tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31313718049716823002018-05-28T22:18:06.407-07:00D.M. Anderson's Free KittensD.M. Anderson's site of author news, interviews, fiction, reviews, essays, cartoons, lists, fun. His two young adult novels, “Killer Cows” and “Shaken,” are available from Quake Publishing.D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.comBlogger116125DmAndersonsFreeKittenshttps://feedburner.google.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-62938536598935192222012-12-04T13:39:00.000-08:002012-12-04T13:39:00.361-08:00My 3rd book WITH THE WICKED, coming in 2013<div style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: large;">This is Charlie...</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HqlIGhjXAsQ/UL5r0ELujPI/AAAAAAAACXg/yMKsOPstlcM/s1600/WTW+I+HEAR+BLACK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="124" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HqlIGhjXAsQ/UL5r0ELujPI/AAAAAAAACXg/yMKsOPstlcM/s200/WTW+I+HEAR+BLACK.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br /><div style="color: red;"><span style="font-size: large;">These are his friends...</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fUBa6VRd8sY/UL5r27VYCII/AAAAAAAACXo/ODeXeqC9Zi0/s1600/WTW+BLACK+DOBERMANS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="178" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fUBa6VRd8sY/UL5r27VYCII/AAAAAAAACXo/ODeXeqC9Zi0/s200/WTW+BLACK+DOBERMANS.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br /><div style="color: red; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">Discover the fun they have together in D.M. Anderson's upcoming book, <i>With the Wicked</i>.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EXq4l3iysTM/UL5r6IK9qzI/AAAAAAAACXw/gmzcGU_y6BM/s1600/WTW+PROMO.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EXq4l3iysTM/UL5r6IK9qzI/AAAAAAAACXw/gmzcGU_y6BM/s400/WTW+PROMO.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: x-large;">COMING IN 2013 from ECHELON PRESS.</span></div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/dVYInFDizZs" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/12/my-3rd-book-with-wicked-coming-in-2013.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-1495076782268736302012-10-26T12:41:00.000-07:002012-10-26T12:41:20.203-07:00Things Which Will Become Extinct in Our Lifetime...<span lang="EN"><strong>PHYSICAL BOOKS</strong> - Already dying. As a writer, I do lament the passing of physical books (love the smell of printed paper), but Kindles are pretty cool and the books are cheaper. On the downside of that, now that just about anyone can write and e-publish a book without and agent or publisher (Smashwords will do it for you for free), the number of available books out there (shitty or otherwise) has exploded exponentially. One of the self-published children’s books currently available on Amazon was written by a convicted serial killer, who likes to write in the dark while naked, and his books are listed right up there with the John Grishams and Stephen Kings. There are so many books out there right now that my first novel only had to sell about five copies to rank number two on one e-book retailer’s bestseller list. Need more proof? Not long ago, several well-known authors collaborated to write an intentionally lousy book, loaded with typos, consistency errors and several chapters repeated twice. It was still published by a company called PublishAmerica, who specialize in convincing would-be authors they can actually write, while bilking them for thousands.<br /> <br /><strong>ALBUMS</strong> - Already dying. We knew this day was coming, and while I still mourn the demise of vinyl records, I have to admit CDs generally sound better and don’t wear out as fast. And they still sound better than compressed downloads. But services like iTunes are killing the album itself as an art form. Sure, some artists are best appreciated for their individual songs, but what about those who create music in which the songs are best listened to within the context of the other songs on the album? And say goodbye to the concept album, folks. On a related note…<br /> <br /><strong>RECORD COMPANIES</strong> - Musical snobs, who have always considered record companies as corporate machines appealing to the mindless masses weaned on American Idol, must be ready to cut their wrists by now. Now even those evil record labels are dying-on-the-vine, since every wannabe with a drum machine or a working knowledge of the tambourine can put their shit up for sale without their help. On a related note…<br /> <br /><strong>MUSICIANSHIP</strong> - Sure, you spent years honing your skills on a particular instrument. But who cares, now that anyone who knows how to click a mouse can compose their own music with same level of virtuosity? I’ve created five albums-worth of music (complete with orchestral background and blindingly-fast solos) with music software created in 2002. On a related note…<br /> <br /><strong>MUSICIANSHIP, PART II</strong> - Look at the sheer number of people who have spent countless days locked in their bedrooms mastering the most difficult songs on Guitar Hero and Rock Band, time which would have been once spent actually learning to play an instrument. On a related note...<br /><br /><strong>ROCK STARS</strong>&nbsp;- What was once a possible way for the truly talented to make a living will become just another hobby, because a lot of people refuse to pay for music anymore. <br /> <br /><strong>DVD &amp; BLU-RAY</strong> - Cannibalism in action. DVD quickly replaced VHS with its better picture quality, convenience and oodles of bonus features appealing to movie geeks. Then came Blu-Ray, which offered most of the same shit, only with a better look at Kevin Costner’s pockmarks. Now it looks like Blu-Ray might enjoy a shorter shelf-life than 8-Track tapes, since it turns out that most folks don’t really give a damn about a $30 Blu-Ray disc when they can catch it on demand for four bucks. Or better yet, steal it online. This is also proof-positive that the average person doesn’t care as much about picture-quality as they do about convenience. <br /> <br /><strong>NETWORK/CABLE/SATELLITE TELEVISION</strong> - Boxed sets, TiVo, the internet…you do not have to catch the latest episode on regular TV. Watch it whenever you want…commercial free. Never mind the fact that it is commercials which make this shit free to begin with. On a related note…<br /> <br /><strong>COMMERCIALS</strong> - Even without flipping to another channel, there are countless ways to avoid them now. But regardless of what you think of them, their demise&nbsp;will be&nbsp;a catalyst for the end of nearly everything you hold dear on your TV. The more you ignore the commercials, the more everything is going to cost.<br /> <br /><strong>THEATRICAL MOVIES</strong> - Technology vs. technology. The more advanced movie technology gets, the more advanced the handheld technology available to moviegoers gets, along with the self-righteous conceit that it is people’s God-given right to use said-technology whenever it suits them. And yes, I‘m talking about cell phones, the number ONE reason I now prefer to watch movies at home (and considering I'm a die-hard cinemaphile who feels movies are best seen in theaters, that is saying a lot). On a related note…<br /> <br /><strong>3-D</strong> - Already dying. Just as it was introduced in the 50s to combat the introduction of television, this is a last-ditch attempt by Hollywood to bilk moviegoers into shelling out $15 for a slew movies which,10 years ago, might have gone straight to DVD. With jacked-up ticket prices (to pay for glasses you can’t reuse for other 3-D films you might decide to see later on), Hollywood makes it obvious they don’t really give a damn about their product, and assumes you’re a dumbshit for buying it. <br /> <br /><strong>EDITORIALS</strong> - There was once a time when an editorial was printed in a newspaper as a commentary on current events, usually written by someone well-skilled in persuasive writing. Now anyone can vomit their opinions on any topic, and because of the resources available on the internet, they can present their ramblings with the visual professionalism of an essay by Walter Cronkite. On a related note…<br /> <br /><strong>CRITICS</strong> - Everyone is a critic now. Need proof? Check out the website, Ain’t It Cool News, written by guys with no regard for the basic mechanics of written English, but held in enough regard by studios that its founder, Harry Knowles, has been invited to movie premieres. <br /> <br /><strong>CIGARETTES</strong> - This one is actually one of the positives. Being a former smoker, I know this from experience. I tried for years to quit, and it wasn’t until someone turned me onto the E-cigarette (an electronic device which dispenses water vapor in place of tar and chemicals), that I was able to stop - cold turkey - and never smoke again. <br /> <br /><strong>LIVE SPORTS</strong> - It used to be fun (and relatively inexpensive) to attend live sporting events. But, like everything else, the cost of cheering on your home team has increased dramatically. That, and with the television coverage often providing a better view of the action from every conceivable angle (which you can often choose).<br /> <strong></strong><br /><strong>MALLS</strong> - Once the bastion for all of your shopping and socializing needs, malls currently have little to offer aside from the occasional novelty kiosk, the chance for individual family members to choose their own restaurant, and a place for the elderly to exercise without braving the elements. <br /> <br /><strong>MP3s &amp; PORTABLE GAMING DEVICES</strong> - At this point, most phones allow you to listen to music and play games. Some people still use them to make actual phone calls. On a related note…<br /> <br /><strong>WRITTEN ENGLISH</strong> - Texting, where proper English is optional, is currently condensing the language into a series of numbers, abbreviations and acronyms. The only time punctuation is required is when the sender wants to include a stupid smiley face. Think I’m exaggerating? I teach middle school, and you’d be stunned to discover the number of students who think using such text terms as IMHO and OMG are perfectly acceptable to include in writing assignments. On a related note…<br /> <br /><strong>LITERACY</strong> - Why bother learning to read when you can just tap a symbol or picture? The ability to read is not required. That’s a picture of a printer…that must mean I can print. On a related note…<br /> <br /><strong>PERSONAL PRINTERS</strong> - I have a printer, but almost never use it. Almost any document I create, either for personal or professional reasons, I can either send as an attachment or transfer to my flash drive, to be printed out by someone else.<br /> <br /><strong>ACTUAL COMPUTER SKILLS</strong> - Aside from the folks who design the new techno-toys which make our current ones obsolete within six months, or the lonely hacks currently trying to create a virus that will make them all crash, most of us know truly little about how the technology we depend on actually <i>works</i>. We’re always hearing about how today’s kids are so-much more technically savvy than the previous generation. Really? Hey, I’ve seen kids use computers. Try taking away their mouse or touch pad and watch most of them flop around like a dolphin caught in a fisherman’s net. <br /> <br /><strong>SNAIL MAIL</strong> - Already dying. Just think…the number of angry, out-of-work postal employees will increase exponentially. <br /> <br /><strong>THIN PEOPLE</strong> - Pixar’s <i>Wall-E </i>may end up being the most prophetic movie of all time.<br /> <br /><strong>SNOW DAYS</strong> - There is going to reach a moment in time when most kids get their schooling online. While that may initially sound pretty cool, kids, think about this. There could be an apocalyptic blizzard outside, but online schools never close.<br /> <br /><strong>SKILLED DRIVERS</strong> - Already dying. Rants about people who talk or text on their phones while driving is already a cliché. <br /> <br /><strong>TRUE SCANDALS</strong> - Thanks to increasing technology, even a minor indiscretion by a famous person is a media-fueled scandal. An embezzling stock-trader is a scandal. Justin Beiber being slapped with a paternity suit isn’t a scandal. That’s a typical 17-year-old forgetting to use a condom. On a related note…<br /> <br /><strong>CELEBRITIES WHO ARE FAMOUS FOR A REASON</strong> - All you need to be famous today are, A) a rich and famous parent, B) a hot body, or C) being the biggest douche bag on a reality TV show. Andy Warhol may have had it right…someday we may all have our few minutes of fame.<br /> <br /><strong>NEWSPAPERS &amp; MAGAZINES</strong> - Already dying. We know why, too. I’ll be the first to agree the demise of physical periodicals would do a lot to save trees and put-off global warming. There isn’t a single magazine or newspaper today that is worth hanging onto for more than a week or two. But, on a related note…<br /> <br /><strong>FACTS</strong> - The so-called Information Age has given-way to the Too Much Information Age, and Google doesn’t separate factual news from someone’s personal rants on the same subject. And the sad fact remains that a lot of people assume what they read or watch must be true. Don’t believe me? Try talking to someone who gets all their information from Fox News Channel.<br /> <br /><strong>SECRETS</strong> - Already dead. Everything you have ever done with a computer is still floating around out there, waiting for someone to grab. And I mean <i>everything</i>.<br /> <br /><strong>TV WEATHER PERSONALITIES</strong> - Unless you are damn good looking, your days as a weather forecaster are numbered, especially if you’re one of those who spend the first several minutes of your segment engaging in humorous banter with your on-air colleagues. It's a hell of a lot faster to get a forecast online.<br /> <br /><strong>MILITARY SERVICE</strong> - We’re already using pilot less spy planes, attack drones and smart bombs. There’s gonna reach a point when the military doesn’t actually need soldiers.<br /> <br /><strong>STRIP CLUBS</strong> - These are depressing places to hang out, anyway. Now, as long as you have a Visa card, you don’t even have to leave your house. And you can ‘finish the job’ without being arrested for indecent exposure.<br /> <br /><strong>SOCIALIZING &amp; DATING, PART 1</strong> - Not to sound like an old fogey, but I met my wife the old fashioned way, by actually being there in-person and impressing her enough to want to go out with me. I didn’t need some computerized service using data to match me up with someone it deemed compatible. I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t have hooked me up with her at all. Now you can skip all the rituals and formalities of traditional mating rituals and cut to the chase…is she gonna sleep with me or not? <br /> <br /><strong>SOCIALIZING &amp; DATING, PART 2</strong> - Again, not to sound like an old fogey, but we used to actually hang out at various places (sometimes even engaging in the ancient art of cruising) in order to socialize with our peers and hang out together. Now you can go on Facebook or Twitter and do the same thing…and you don’t even have to dress up for it. My own daughter has a ton of friends she never really interacts with outside of Facebook. On a related note…<br /> <br /><strong>CLASS REUNIONS</strong> - Granted, class reunions have historically been excuses for people to show-off what they have accomplished in their lives and see who's gotten balder or fatter. I didn’t attend my 25-year reunion because most of the people I actually wanted to contact again I’ve done so through Facebook. The best part is that I only have to show the best photos of myself I choose to post, so they don’t see how fat I’ve gotten.<br /> <br /><strong>LIVE CONCERTS</strong> - I used to attend a lot of concerts before they became so expensive that I needed to refinance my home just to go to one. The last concert I went to was Kiss a few years ago, and when the lights went down, it wasn’t a sea of lighters illuminating the arena. It was a sea of cell phone screens capturing the event. And indeed, every song the band performed was made available on YouTube the very next day.<br /> <br /><strong>CARS &amp; OIL</strong> - The more we can accomplish without ever leaving the house, the less we will rely on these things. <br /> <br /><strong>PEOPLE WHO CREATE MUSIC, BOOKS, MOVIES AND VIDEO GAMES FOR A LIVING</strong> - Sure, we love getting them for free. Ask yourself this…would you do <i>your</i> job for free? Neither will they. </span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/rqriCyNYAFs" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/10/things-which-will-become-extinct-in-our.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-77510798779296871202012-08-07T13:50:00.000-07:002012-08-07T13:52:03.603-07:00KITTEN KIBBLES<span lang="EN"></span><br /><span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-36z98XkaH2U/UCF-sCRtKBI/AAAAAAAABBI/V4rb1J9cdp0/s1600/spider.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-36z98XkaH2U/UCF-sCRtKBI/AAAAAAAABBI/V4rb1J9cdp0/s1600/spider.png" /></a></div>I wonder if spiders sometimes see their reflection and go, <em>"AHHH!!!"</em> <br /> <br />My daughter, a quite observational young lady, suggested that the pronunciation word <i>fire</i> should be officially changed to <i><strong>fiyah!</strong> </i>(exclamation included), being that’s how it’s always pronounced in every fantasy movie and heavy metal song ever made. It does sound cooler that way.<br /> <br />Peanut Butter makes damn near everything taste better.<br /> <br />Stop acting outraged by crap spewed by people like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly. You are reacting exactly like they want you to. Haven’t you figure it out yet? What they are doing is an <i>act </i>(just like Andrew Dice Clay in the 90s). No one but the truly insane would boast being <i>that</i> jingoistic, racist, homophobic, misinformed, apathetic &amp; misogynistic unless they are doing it for attention. <br /> <br />You know what's so cool about Ozzy Osbourne? The fact that he's not really a great singer, he <i>knows</i> he's not really a great singer, and he's <i>open</i> about the fact he's not really a great singer. Still, try to imagine anyone else singing his songs. Can't be done.<br /> <br />As a professional educator, of course I understand the importance of reading and math skills, but not at the expense of everything else necessary to function in the real world, such as being able to read a non-digital clock. Every year, not only do I have an increasing number of students unable to tell time, but they think it's totally <em>reasonable</em> to lack such a rudimentary skill.<br /> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZVtRuWBaJP8/UCF-yt1wDjI/AAAAAAAABBQ/aP7fdKTDiik/s1600/shovel.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZVtRuWBaJP8/UCF-yt1wDjI/AAAAAAAABBQ/aP7fdKTDiik/s1600/shovel.png" /></a></div>More people need to be hit over the head with a shovel.<br /> <br />The number of folks who snap a picture of themselves for their own Facebook page shows just how alone so many of them really are.<br /> <br />Maybe if&nbsp;some people&nbsp;stopped spending their waking hours <i>looking</i> for racism, it would simply go away.<br /> <br />Try this experiment sometime...go to a mall, or simply walk down the street, and count the number of people you physically bump into because they automatically expect <i>you</i> to move out of <i>their</i> way.<br /> <br />I wish my iPad knew when my finger accidentally touched a link I didn’t intend to.<br /> <br />I would have enjoyed the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympics a lot more if the NBC announcers would have just shut the hell up once in awhile.<br /> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mbV8ej3Ja70/UCF-5lzBpII/AAAAAAAABBY/R9lfAfBgifU/s1600/douchbg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mbV8ej3Ja70/UCF-5lzBpII/AAAAAAAABBY/R9lfAfBgifU/s1600/douchbg.png" /></a></div>To those of you douchbags who love to claim you’re ‘keepin’ it real’...what exactly are you keeping real? </span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/zYZBUnj8TYI" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/08/kitten-kibbles.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-60653279015718453812012-07-24T13:43:00.000-07:002012-08-25T13:09:10.900-07:00STAR WARS: The Much Shorter Director's Cut<div style="text-align: center;"><em><strong>Starring Kenny Baker, Anthony Daniels, Carrie Fisher &amp; David Prowse. </strong></em></div><div style="text-align: center;"><em><strong>Directed by George Lucas. </strong></em><em><strong>Re-edited by D.M. Anderson.</strong></em></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-K7CSyLM1Qic/UA27BZPOm6I/AAAAAAAAAwU/TrFbweZ4LbQ/s1600/star+wars+pix+1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-K7CSyLM1Qic/UA27BZPOm6I/AAAAAAAAAwU/TrFbweZ4LbQ/s1600/star+wars+pix+1.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-size: large;">"I want to know what you've done with those plans!"</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5CUUTUGuASE/UA27U2ReLZI/AAAAAAAAAwc/5Pyv8PvEn5U/s1600/star+wars+8.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5CUUTUGuASE/UA27U2ReLZI/AAAAAAAAAwc/5Pyv8PvEn5U/s1600/star+wars+8.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-size: large;">"R2...Take these plans, get in the escape pod and find Obi Wan Kenobi. He's our only hope."</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8QOlLYdyoVk/UA27oPs21FI/AAAAAAAAAwk/vRe3RYj4lyw/s1600/star+wars+pix+4.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8QOlLYdyoVk/UA27oPs21FI/AAAAAAAAAwk/vRe3RYj4lyw/s320/star+wars+pix+4.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aFs4v3_iFIM/UA27ueh5xbI/AAAAAAAAAws/uDJqqYFb-XI/s1600/star+wars+pix+5.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="135" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aFs4v3_iFIM/UA27ueh5xbI/AAAAAAAAAws/uDJqqYFb-XI/s320/star+wars+pix+5.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-size: large;">"Funny...the damage doesn't look as bad from out here."</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RK10KB4owPU/UA275v-cWGI/AAAAAAAAAw0/gOeMKKlNdC8/s1600/star+wars+pix+7.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RK10KB4owPU/UA275v-cWGI/AAAAAAAAAw0/gOeMKKlNdC8/s1600/star+wars+pix+7.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-size: large;">"Lord Vader, an escape pod was just launched, but there are no life signs aboard."</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-z8O9gqw8Rn4/UA28waD6PFI/AAAAAAAAAw8/CXk3xQxIZhk/s1600/star+wars+6.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="217" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-z8O9gqw8Rn4/UA28waD6PFI/AAAAAAAAAw8/CXk3xQxIZhk/s320/star+wars+6.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-size: large;">"Eh, blow it up, anyway. Your boys could use the practice."</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-D0YM978OlTk/UA29VsHpjNI/AAAAAAAAAxM/M9FbVPbEIC4/s1600/star+wars+explosion.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-D0YM978OlTk/UA29VsHpjNI/AAAAAAAAAxM/M9FbVPbEIC4/s320/star+wars+explosion.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-size: x-large;"><strong><em>EMPIRE WINS...THE END</em></strong></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: red; color: #eeeeee; font-size: large;">For more movies essays, reviews, lists and humor,</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: red; color: #eeeeee; font-size: large;">visit FREE KITTENS MOVIE GUIDE</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: red; font-size: large;"><a href="http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/">http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com</a></span></div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/3NL6zQA9HaU" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/07/star-wars-much-shorter-directors-cut.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-48778126696434647212012-07-07T15:18:00.005-07:002012-07-07T15:21:00.483-07:00Free Kittens Movie Guide<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Zqi8eCWJUcg/T_i1YtOcSOI/AAAAAAAAAns/67sM6MuVO7g/s1600/FK+poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Zqi8eCWJUcg/T_i1YtOcSOI/AAAAAAAAAns/67sM6MuVO7g/s320/FK+poster.jpg" width="256" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: yellow; font-size: x-large;">The latest posts at </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: yellow; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><strong>FREE KITTENS MOVIE GUIDE</strong></span> </div><div style="text-align: center;">(<a href="http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/">http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/</a>)</div><br />20 Things We Learn from Watching INDEPENDENCE DAY <br /><a href="http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/2012/07/independence-day.html">http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/2012/07/independence-day.html</a><br /><br />ZOMBIE: A Review in Verse<br /><a href="http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/2012/07/zombie-zombi-2a-review-in-verse.html">http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/2012/07/zombie-zombi-2a-review-in-verse.html</a><br /><br />TWO-MINUTE WARNING: The Pros and Cons of Cheap Sunglasses<br /><a href="http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/2012/07/two-minute-warning.html">http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/2012/07/two-minute-warning.html</a><br /><br />MYSTERIOUS ISLAND: A Serious Case of the Crabs<br /><a href="http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/2012/06/mysterious-island-1961.html">http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/2012/06/mysterious-island-1961.html</a><br /><br />APOLLO 18: Just You Thought You were Safe from Dumb People<br /><a href="http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/2012/06/apollo-18.html">http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/2012/06/apollo-18.html</a><br /><br />SAVING PRIVATE RYAN: The Most Beloved Gorefest of All time<br /><a href="http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/2012/06/saving-private-ryan.html">http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/2012/06/saving-private-ryan.html</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/PAEfIExFigQ" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/07/free-kittens-movie-guide.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-30268672518177024992012-06-24T17:56:00.001-07:002012-06-24T18:07:35.718-07:0040 Reasons RUSH Still Rules<span lang="EN"></span><br /><span lang="EN"></span><br /><span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_esGHbQzlZA/T-e3C--lyHI/AAAAAAAAAjo/as5eiBKxA1w/s1600/rush.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_esGHbQzlZA/T-e3C--lyHI/AAAAAAAAAjo/as5eiBKxA1w/s200/rush.png" width="169" /></a></div>1. The song, “2112,” is arguably the most famous side-long epic ever recorded.<br /><br /> 2. Rush was the first concert I ever went to. Tickets were only nine bucks. Imagine that. Nowadays, you can't even see a movie for that price.<br /><br /> 3. They've never made the same album twice, even after <i>Moving Pictures </i>sold uber-millions of copies.<br /><br /> 4. They kept the same line-up for almost 40 years.<br /><br /> 5. It’s only three guys, but they sound like six.<br /><br /> 6. They do not sound like anybody else. You know a Rush song when you hear it.<br /><br /> 7. <i>Rolling Stone </i>magazine has always hated them.<br /><br /> 8. They never really gave a damn if they any had hit singles.<br /><br /> 9. Hey, just <em>try</em> playing “La Villa Strangiato.” <br /><br /> 10. Neil Peart single-handedly inspired ‘air-drumming.’<br /><br /> 11. They are one of the few so-called ‘classic rock’ artists&nbsp;who still regularly sell-out arenas.<br /><br /> 12. Stage props have included giant rabbits, washing machines and chicken broilers.<br /><br /> 13. Most of us would develop carpel-tunnel syndrome trying to learn their songs.<br /><br /> 14. <i>Rush in Rio</i>! This DVD has to be seen to be believed.<br /><br /> 15. They trail only <i>The Beatles </i>and <i>The Rolling Stones </i>for the most consecutive gold records.<br /><br /> 16. Never cool, and they never cared.<br /><br /> 17. Geddy Lee’s nose.<br /><br /> 18. One of the few bands never to feature photos of themselves on <i>any</i> album covers.<br /><br /> 19. They wrote <i>every</i> song on <i>all 20 </i>of their albums.<br /><br /> 20. The first band to ever appear on <i>The Colbert Report</i>.<br /><br /> 21. Their shows are three hours long...with no opening act.<br /><br /> 22. One of the few rock artists lucky enough to have made a massively-popular, critically-acclaimed album that everyone is now sick of hearing (<i>Moving Pictures</i>).<br /><br /> 23. They sound just as good live as they do on record.<br /><br /> 24. Geddy Lee’s instantly-identifiable vocals. <br /><br /> 25. There isn’t a musician alive who doesn’t respect them.<br /><br /> 26. Awesome album covers (well...maybe not <i>Hemispheres</i>).<br /><br /> 27. They ended up becoming bigger than all of the bands they once opened up for.<br /><br /> 28. Neil Peart had to overcome more unfathomable personal tragedy in a single year (the deaths of his wife and daughter) than most attention-starved celebrities can even imagine in a lifetime.<br /><br /> 30. They seem to be pretty boring individuals, meaning they had to impress the world through actual talent.<br /><br /> 31. One of the few bands that many parents are successfully able to get their kids to like.<br /><br /> 32. Alex Lifeson is a really funny guy.<br /><br /> 33. Even after being around 40 years, racking up 23 gold and 14 platinum albums, they’ve never even been <i>nominated</i> for entry into the Rock &amp; Roll Hall of Fame, thus exposing the ‘honor’ for what it is...an elitist club determined by personal tastes of a select few, not an artist’s actual talent, success, musical influence or longetivity.<br /><br /> 34. After their first three albums underperformed sales-wise, Mercury Records demanded something more commercial sounding for the fourth record. Rush responded with what may be the ultimate fuck you...<i>2112</i>.<br /><br /> 35. <i>By-Tor and the Snow Dog</i>, the band’s first foray into lengthy, fantasy-tinged, multi-part epics, was inspired their manager’s German Shepherd, who growled at a roadie.<br /><br /> 36. Neil Peart’s drum kit would fill up most people’s living rooms.<br /><br /> 37. They are aging gracefully for a hard rock band.<br /><br /> 38. Rush fans worldwide are always in constant fear that the band’s most recent album will be their last.<br /><br /> 39. Rush is a fucking awesome name for a band.<br /><br /> 40. Their <i>20th</i> studio album, <i>Clockwork Angels</i>, is actually their first true concept album (an album where all the songs tell a single story), and it debuted at #2 on the Billboard charts.</span><br /><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/4zmm9evdcc0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/06/40-reasons-why-rush-still-rules.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-32742103584582532242012-06-12T22:03:00.001-07:002012-06-12T22:03:21.587-07:00The Tale of Kevin<span lang="EN"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mv7tWa0PEcU/T9gcQlIr1QI/AAAAAAAAAgk/LgG4qL_mmHg/s1600/iPAD+pix+019.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mv7tWa0PEcU/T9gcQlIr1QI/AAAAAAAAAgk/LgG4qL_mmHg/s320/iPAD+pix+019.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kevin</td></tr></tbody></table>For the past year and a half, I’ve been sharing a bed with Kevin. Even though my wife and I have been married nearly 24 years, and we get along just fine, she’s okay with that. In fact, because I tend to snore pretty loud, she prefers I bed-down for the night with Kevin instead. That way she can get a good night’s sleep and not spend the next day searching the web for the cheapest divorce lawyer. So, I guess I don’t actually share a <i>bed</i> with Kevin; most nights we share the living room couch. That’s okay, because Kevin doesn’t take up a lot of room and doesn’t get all pissy when I snore like a busted chainsaw.<br /> <br />And when the family travels elsewhere, like to my mother-in-law’s house about six weekends a year, Kevin comes along because I’m now used to sleeping with him. If he’s not there for me to wrap my arms around, it’s hard for me to fall asleep. Sometimes my dependence on Kevin has my mother-in-law looking at me funny, but that’s okay. She’s seen me say and do weirder things, some of which probably made her wonder why her daughter ever married me.<br /> <br />I’m a middle school teacher, and earlier this year we had a ‘Pajama Day’ fundraiser, when staff and students could donate a couple of dollars and come to school in their pajamas (you know, grocery shopping attire for some of us). I brought Kevin along that day, and even though I live &amp; work in Portland (hipster capital of the world), most of my students found my companion strange and amusing, especially at my age. As for me, <i>I</i> personally found it amusing that, in a town with more lesbians-per-capita than an Indigo Girls concert, some of them found my relationship so bizarre.<br /> <br />Even though Kevin is starting to get a bit dingy, and bathes far less than the rest of us (in fact, he’s <i>never</i> bathed), my wife, kids and dog (who sometimes chases him when I throw him down the hall) all like him very much. <br /> <br />In case you haven’t figured it out, Kevin is a stuffed animal. More specifically, he’s a stuffed <i>Yeti</i>, just like the one from the <i>Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer</i>. My parents gave him to me when I was in the hospital in late 2010. I was initially admitted for what appeared to be pneumonia, but it ended up being something life-threatening which required open-heart surgery. I was in the hospital for two months, drifting in-and-out of medically-induced comas and eventually having to re-learn such simple tasks as getting out of bed and bathing myself (when you’ve got 30 staples in your chest, that shit‘s easier said than done). <br /> <br />Anyway, I was in the hospital during the winter holidays, miserable, in pain and feeling sorry for myself as I spent endless sleepless nights channel-surfing through 60 channels of what the hospital euphemistically called cable TV. Lots of people - family, friends, co-workers - would visit, often bringing gifts, cards and food packages. Karen, the publisher of my books, managed to send me a care package containing a stuffed cow and several hundred dollars which fellow authors graciously donated. My co-worker and dear friend, Laura, arrived with literally hundreds of cards, letters and gifts from students and colleagues. As someone who, for years, has cultivated an image as being the hard-ass teacher-from-hell, that kinda&nbsp;knocked my defenses down. <br /> <br />Then Kevin showed up in my mom’s arms, still neatly packaged in his Build-A-Bear box, wearing jammies and slippers. I smiled and said thanks, of course, then had her stack it with all the other gifts piling up in my hospital room. Like the monstrous Yeti in Rudolph, he had no name at that time. By the way, when I was a little kid, that Yeti scared the shit out of me every holiday season when the show aired.<br /> <br />During my lengthy rehab period, I was forced to get out of bed with the aid of a sturdy, heart-shaped pillow, which I had to hug to my chest whenever I moved around. I was also instructed to keep it close to my chest while sleeping or whenever my chest hurt. <br /> <br />Anyway, one day, out of boredom, I took Kevin out of his box and found his soft furry body to be far more comforting than the heart-pillow, so I soon took to using him in its place. I don’t know what prompted me to eventually give him a name, and why I chose Kevin. I guess I just thought it was a funny name to give an inanimate object. <br /> <br />When I was finally allowed to go home, I still needed a cane to walk around, still needed chest support while sleeping or getting out of bed. Kevin did latter the jobs just fine. <br /> <br />I was eventually able to ditch the cane, but I’d gotten so accustomed to having clutching Kevin to my chest that I found I was unable to go to sleep without him. Because I’ve <i>always</i> tossed and turned in my sleep, more often than not, Kevin would end up on the floor. Didn’t matter...I <i>had </i>to have him with me at bedtime.<br /> <br />A year and a half later, I still do. There have been occasions when I’ve torn the house apart looking for him before turning in for the night. He no longer wears the slippers and jammies he arrived in; he looks better without all that stuff. However, my wife <i>did</i> buy a pair of Build-A-Bear underpants for him last Christmas, which he still wears on occasion (usually when company comes over). He looks funny in underpants, and since I’ll likely never fulfill <i>my</i> lifelong dream of hanging around the house every day in <i>my</i> underpants, maybe I’m doing it vicariously through Kevin.<br /> <br />I think my irrational attachment to a stuffed toy has rubbed off on my family. And I don’t mean my kids. Hell, they both have enough stuffed animals to start their <i>own</i> colony of misfit toys. I mean my wife - not much younger than me - who decided she wanted a stuffed companion of her <i>own</i> as an anniversary gift. So, after a wonderful Sushi dinner to celebrate our 23rd anniversary, we went to Build-A-Bear, where she made and dressed a stuffed puppy, named <i>Dave 2</i>.<br /> <br />At any rate, here I am...a 48-year-old, married man with two children (one which has outgrown similar childhood friends), a mortgage, and a masters degree...with a stupid attachment to a stuffed animal, given to me on a whim during the most dire moment of my life. I’m not someone overly sentimental, nor do I consciously try to engage in charmingly-eccentric behavior. I’ve simply gotten used to Kevin always being around at bedtime. <br /> <br />How stupid is <em>that</em>? <br /> <br />He’s sitting next to me right now, resting from the photo session required for the picture you see above. He was initially snowy white, though not-so-much anymore. By the time I’m dead and he’s buried with me, Kevin will likely be brown enough to be more mistaken for a teddy bear than a snow monster. My wife suggested putting him in the washing machine once. But what if he sprang a leak and all his stuffing came out? <br /> <br />I dunno...I don’t think I could handle a deflated Kevin, and the last time I was at Build-A-Bear, there were no more Yetis to be found. Besides, even if there were, none of them would be <i>Kevin</i>, would they? We’ve literally been through too much together for me to simply replace him.<br /> <br />It ain’t like he’s some a goldfish you can just flush down the toilet and replace with another. <br /> <br />He’s <i>Kevin</i>, Dave’s Yeti.</span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/xgHE0cB_gVw" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/06/tale-of-kevin.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-6589835211598053322012-05-31T20:36:00.001-07:002012-05-31T20:36:11.748-07:00DMG: Dave's Movie Guide<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y5230YF37Jc/T8g4Uu7YNWI/AAAAAAAAAeQ/jamGqS9lpSM/s1600/film.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y5230YF37Jc/T8g4Uu7YNWI/AAAAAAAAAeQ/jamGqS9lpSM/s1600/film.png" /></a></div>Over the past few months, I've been posting essays/reviews under the title of <em>Dave's Movie Guide</em>, consisting of films I grew up with that had some kind of impact on my life, either because of the movies themselves or the events surrounding the times I first saw them. They are somewhat irreverent essays that are a cross between actual reviews and autobiographical narratives. <br /><br />Anyway, because of the number of hits those essays have gotten on <em>Free Kittens</em>, I've started a new blogsite (<em>DMG: Dave's Movie Guide</em>) dedicated just to those. You can find it here: <a href="http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/">http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/</a><br /><br />In addition to continuing looks back at some great and not-so-great films, there are lists, old movie posters, movie ads, screen shots&nbsp;and old theater marquees, mostly surrounding movies fromt he 70s and 80s.<br /><br />Please check it out, follow the blog,&nbsp;pass it along&nbsp;and feel free to leave comments about movies influential on your life.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/4uc1IN5IPtQ" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/05/dmg-daves-movie-guide.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-67466718069334460022012-05-14T16:36:00.002-07:002012-05-14T16:36:49.119-07:00"Shaken" Novel Trailer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/btHtQ0C3uh4?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0' /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><strong>Click the&nbsp;tsunami to view the promotional trailer for my second young adult novel, <em>Shaken</em>.</strong></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-igSyJZn4aE0/T7GWtXxPQlI/AAAAAAAAAbc/0EBmmHZGuDk/s1600/Shaken.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-igSyJZn4aE0/T7GWtXxPQlI/AAAAAAAAAbc/0EBmmHZGuDk/s200/Shaken.jpg" width="133" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><em>Natalie, a self-centered girl, is dragged away by her family at the worst possible time.<br /><br />Damien, a juvenile delinquent condemned as an accessory to murder.<br /><br />Connor, an angry young man unable to get over the death of his father.<br /><br />Three teenagers from different backgrounds, each suffering pain and loss, must now find strength, responsibility, and heroism they didn’t know they possessed when the worst disaster in American history, a 9.7 earthquake devastates the Pacific Northwest. Their struggle for survival will not only test their resolve; it will affect the lives of everyone around them.<br /><br />Can they let go of their own personal issues and look beyond themselves before a massive tsunami destroys them all?</em></div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/bntHVUc7xbU" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/05/shaken-novel-trailer.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-62048448198611679192012-05-04T11:53:00.000-07:002012-05-04T11:53:23.367-07:00"Shaken" Now Available in Paperback<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.createspace.com/3867878" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fwPjysBCmTk/T6Qh7D2gD6I/AAAAAAAAAZg/SLPp--KTS-I/s200/shaken+cover.jpeg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Click cover to buy</td></tr></tbody></table>My second young adult novel, <i>Shaken</i>, is now available in paperback. <i><b>Click on the cover to order. </b></i><br /><br /><i>Natalie, a self-centered girl, is dragged away by her family at the worst possible time.<br /><br />Damien, a juvenile delinquent condemned as an accessory to murder.<br /><br />Connor, an angry young man unable to get over the death of his father.<br /><br />Three teenagers from different backgrounds, each suffering pain and loss, must now find strength, responsibility, and heroism they didn’t know they possessed when the worst disaster in American history, a 9.7 earthquake devastates the Pacific Northwest. Their struggle for survival will not only test their resolve; it will affect the lives of everyone around them.<br /><br />Can they let go of their own personal issues and look beyond themselves before a massive tsunami destroys them all?</i><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><u><b>A few review excerpts:</b></u></div><br /><b><i>From Lavender Lines&nbsp;</i></b><br /><b><i>http://lavenderlines.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/shaken-d-m-anderson/&nbsp;</i></b><br /><br />The way Anderson described the earthquake, and what happens after, made me feel like I was watching it happen. I could feel the tension, the hope, the desperation as characters struggled to deal with the aftermath and trying to survive. My heart was pounding during certain scenes, breaking during others.<br /><br /> Now, I don’t want you to think that this was just an action book, because that’s so not the case. There was some nice character development in <em>Shaken</em>. I enjoyed watching the teens grow and realize who they really are. I felt for these characters and I cared what happened to them.<br /><br /> <em>Shaken</em> was just a great all around read. For fans of disaster movies, disaster books and just great YA books, I recommend <em>Shaken</em>.<br /><br /><b><i>From Sabrina Sumsion </i></b><br /><b><i>http://www.sabrinasumsion.com/index.php/writing-industry/15-book-reviews/18-shaken-by-d-m-anderson</i></b><br /><br />Post trauma stories fascinate me. Imagine your world falling apart. What do you do? How do you survive? Do you let yourself fall apart? Do you do whatever it takes to survive? Do you find in yourself the strength to help others or crawl over their dying backs?<br /> <br /> In Shaken, the story follows three teens who face these challenges. After a traumatic earthquake shakes the western coast of America, a small beach community tears asunder. One teen is a native, the other two are visitors who would have passed through with a few memories in normal life.<br /><br /> D.M. Anderson writes for teenagers using their slang and often showing an insight to their thoughts and maturity level that someone without access to teens regularly lacks. I felt sometimes he let too much slip into his narrative and weakened the flow of the story but luckily, the plot line contains plenty of action to keep a reader turning pages to find out what happens next. <br /><br /> For my cautious readers: I felt the story contained enough villainous acts to maintain a sense of danger without crossing the line into adult material. I only remember one word that would be considered profane. All in all, I am comfortable recommending this book to parents as a discussion book.<br /><br /><br /><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/EoNtB7pZ8dY" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/05/shaken-now-available-in-paperback.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-22077649421788788702012-04-30T16:11:00.001-07:002012-04-30T16:11:50.140-07:00New and Noteworthy from Echelon Press<span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nEKsp1KpDEE/T58bDQqpRXI/AAAAAAAAAYw/Ugqu4qOnSaM/s1600/demonkin.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nEKsp1KpDEE/T58bDQqpRXI/AAAAAAAAAYw/Ugqu4qOnSaM/s200/demonkin.png" width="133" /></a></div><strong><em>DECEPTIONS - A Demonkin Novel</em></strong><br /><strong><em>by Sean Hayden</em></strong><br /> <br /></span>The great State of California has elected themselves a new governor…and he’s a vampire!<br /> <br />Many hope it will bring some peace between the humans and vampires. Many don’t, which could be the reason someone is trying to kill him. Knowing they can’t protect him from supernatural terrorist attacks, the Department of Homeland Security turns to the only people who can, the FBI. More importantly, their only vampire agent.<br /> <br />Ashlyn may be Governor Greer’s only hope, but can she keep him alive without starting a war of her own?<br /> <br />When the lines become blurred and it becomes difficult to separate her enemies from her allies, Ashlyn may end up doing just that.<br /> <br />Read an excerpt and purchase at <a href="https://www.omnilit.com/product-deceptions-772938-234.html">https://www.omnilit.com/product-deceptions-772938-234.html</a><br /> <b><i></i></b><br /><b><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FjmmpMEorH8/T58bP5sY3eI/AAAAAAAAAY4/jB6OA3StIOw/s1600/in+the+midnight.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FjmmpMEorH8/T58bP5sY3eI/AAAAAAAAAY4/jB6OA3StIOw/s200/in+the+midnight.png" width="133" /></a></div>IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR <br />by&nbsp;Reggie Ridgway&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <br /><br /></i></b>Doctor Jonathan Anderson is having the worst day of his life.<br /> <br />Forced to resign from his prestigious position as chief of surgery, he goes home to find his wife in bed with another man. On the brink of suicide, his wife tries to wrestle the gun from him and is accidentally killed. Convicted for her murder, he finds himself in prison, but after managing to escape, he ends up in the same hospital he ran, this time as a patient.<br /> <br />Hell-bent, Anderson seeks revenge on those responsible for ruining his life. Things are not as they should be, and a series of murders ups the stakes, but despite the work of two committed hospital employees and the investigating detective, the identity of the murderer and the motive for the heinous crimes may come too late to save any of them.<br /> <br />“A fast paced thriller with good story points and characters which are believable and worth reading about.” Author Scott Nicholson says. “You won’t want to go to the hospital again after reading In the Midnight Hour.”<br /> <br />Buy at <a href="http://www.omnilit.com/product-inthemidnighthour-770328-249.html">http://www.omnilit.com/product-inthemidnighthour-770328-249.html</a><br /> <b><i></i></b><br /><b><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RRXqJQbE-68/T58bYpkA8YI/AAAAAAAAAZA/sEexZxOcbeE/s1600/human.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RRXqJQbE-68/T58bYpkA8YI/AAAAAAAAAZA/sEexZxOcbeE/s1600/human.png" /></a></div>A HUMAN ELEMENT<br />by Donna Galanti&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <br /><br /></i></b>One by one, Laura Armstrong’s friends and adoptive family members are being murdered, and despite her special healing powers, there is nothing she can do to stop it. The killer haunts her dreams and leaves cryptic notes advising her to use her powers to save herself because she’s next.<br /> <br />Determined to find the killer, she follows her visions to her hometown and the site of a crashed meteorite. There she meets Ben Fieldstone, who seeks answers about his parents’ death the night the meteorite struck. In a race to stop a mad man, they unravel a frightening mystery that binds them together.<br /> <br />But the killer’s desire to destroy Laura face-to-face leads to a showdown that puts her relationship with Ben in jeopardy and her pure spirit to the test. With the killer closing in, Laura discovers her destiny is linked to the stranger and she has two choices – redeem him or kill him.<br /> <br />Buy at <a href="https://www.omnilit.com/product-ahumanelement-750768-234.html">https://www.omnilit.com/product-ahumanelement-750768-234.html</a><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/ZEgOvcx3ox0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/04/new-and-noteworthy-from-echelon-press.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-44650405272885108402012-04-21T16:46:00.003-07:002012-04-21T16:47:49.754-07:00What If David Lee Roth Had Never Left Van Halen?<span lang="EN"></span><br /><span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-iXOFWnEa4gg/T5NFZ_L2pFI/AAAAAAAAAW4/r11Jm-hH_Ew/s1600/van+halen.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-iXOFWnEa4gg/T5NFZ_L2pFI/AAAAAAAAAW4/r11Jm-hH_Ew/s1600/van+halen.png" /></a></div>Van Halen vs. Van Hagar. An argument as old as time, and just about as boring. Ever since 1985, when David Lee Roth either quit or was fired from Van Halen (depends on who you ask), you’ve had purists claiming the Roth-era is the only true Van Halen, and everything released with Sammy Hagar is watered down, synth-happy pop. Hagar performed on four VH albums over the next ten years, all of them reaching #1 on the Billboard charts, before he also quit and/or was fired (again, it depends on who you ask). <br /> <br /> Of course those purists, after years of rumors and false-starts, got their wish when Roth reunited with Van Halen for a monumentally successful tour in 2007. It wasn’t a true reunion of the original band, though. In the ultimate act of rock &amp; roll nepotism, longtime bassist Michael Anthony was unceremoniously dumped and replaced by Eddie Van Halen’s pudgy son, Wolfgang. <br /> <br /> Since absolutely no record company was interested in signing the band without Roth or Hagar (the latter of whom ultimately burned those bridges with his amusing tell-all autobiography), this reunion was inevitable. <br /> <br /> But where would Van Halen really be today if Roth never left to begin with? To answer this question, it is necessary to go back to what first made Van Halen a household name.<br /> <br /> Eddie Van Halen fired the shot heard ‘round the world, at least in rock circles, when his instrumental workout, “Eruption,” was included on the band’s debut album in 1978. Usually coupled on radio with their cover of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” “Eruption” introduced an unsuspecting audience to an innovative and flashy guitarist who was different from traditional guitar heroes like Clapton, Page, Hendrix and Blackmore. First of all, he was really fucking fast, though much of his ‘speed’ stemmed from a finger-tapping technique which, while not actually fast, prompted many budding guitarists to say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” The point is that Eddie Van Halen, like Hendrix, was an innovator, a master of his instrument, and most listeners were exposed to that through “Eruption,” arguably the first-ever guitar solo that did not require prior knowledge of guitar technique to appreciate. With that one-and-a-half minute track, Eddie Van Halen inspired countless kids to pick up a guitar, and scared the shit out of others still trying to make it in the music business.<br /> <br /> But with all due respect to Mr. Van Halen’s musical abilities (easily the MVP on their debut album), it was ultimately David Lee Roth who truly propelled the band to superstardom. No, the man couldn’t really sing very well, his so-called ability to scream paling in comparison to Roger Daltrey, Robert Plant or Ian Gillan (all of whom <i>could</i> sing). But what Roth had that the aforementioned didn’t was a sense of uninhibited, cocky showmanship, as well as enough self-depreciating humor to understand that rock wasn’t supposed to be art…it was supposed to be fun. How the lyrics sounded was a lot more important than the words themselves. He was the member of the band with all the good looks, the one who acted like a rock star, the one invited on all the talk shows, the one who hammed it up in VH's music videos, the one supplying an infinite number of quotable sound-bites for the press. By the time the band released their sixth album, the uberselling <i>1984</i>, chutzpah and arrogance went a lot further than true talent and, for better or worse, Roth had both. If Eddie was the cake for success, but Roth was the frosting, most people’s favorite part.<br /> <br /> Think about it, if pure instrumental virtuosity was the only prerequisite for success, then Yngwie Malmsteen would be the biggest rock star of the 80s. If you don’t know who Yngwie Malmsteen is, then you’ve just confirmed my argument.<br /> <br /> So when Roth left (in a very acrimonious break-up), many understandably assumed that was the end of the band. Historically, the simple fact is that many rock bands are most identified by the general public through their lead singers, not who writes all the songs or plays the guitar. And the bigger the band, the more daunting the task of replacing the singer. Very few mega-selling bands in rock history have been able to replace their high-profile lead singers in mid-career and continue the same level of success. One could argue that AC/DC, who were forced to replace the recently deceased Bon Scott with Brian Johnson, are one of the few exceptions. But even <i>they</i> weren't a household name at the time. <br /> <br /> Van Halen already was, coming off of the biggest album of their career. Roth’s presence in the band (and the media) was so huge at the time it seemed inconceivable anyone could adequately take his place. <br /> <br /> But that’s not how things turned out.<br /> <br /> Roth went on to a solo career that, like a shooting star, shined ever-so-brightly before quickly flaming out. At the same time, the remaining members of Van Halen made the single smartest move of their career…they hooked up with Sammy Hagar, essentially turning Van Halen into an 80s version of the supergroup.<br /> <br /> At the time, Hagar himself already enjoyed a lucrative solo career, having released several successful solo albums, some of which went platinum. Most rock fans already knew who he was, so this key line-up change was not nearly as big of a risk as replacing Roth with an unknown. Hagar may not have been as goofy or good-looking as Roth, but he could write music, play guitar and was a far-more accomplished vocalist, not to mention he brought along a respectable fan base of his own. Regardless of what anyone thinks of Hagar-era Van Halen albums, hiring Hagar was a great move. At the very least, <i>5150</i>, the first album to feature Hagar, would sell a lot of copies based solely on the curiosity factor. <br /> <br /> In the ensuing decade, longtime Roth fans continued to bitch ad-nauseum that the music of ‘Van Hagar’ was softer, more serious, more keyboard-driven, and it’s hard to argue with such a claim. But really, those same changes in the band’s sound are largely responsible for Van Halen’s continued chart success, long after many other 80s-era metal bands were dropping like flies due to the shifts in musical tastes. And even die-hard Roth zealots have to admit the band, as fronted by Roth, represented the same type of flashy, image-driven, hedonistic and over-the-top ideal that people began to turn away from in the early 90s. Not that Hagar was some sort of down-to-Earth dude who wrote deep introspective lyrics, but unlike Roth, he did often attempt to write about subjects other than sex, cars and getting shit-faced. During his time in VH, Roth was adamantly against adding keyboards to the mix; it has been well-documented he did not want “Jump” (their biggest single) to be included on <i>1984</i>. Whether or not his stance was a catalyst for his eventual departure (or the surprise success of his EP of cover tunes, <i>Crazy from the Heat</i>) doesn‘t really matter. Simply put, Roth didn’t want VH to change from the tried and true, and Hagar was willing to adapt.<br /> <br /> So, the argument here isn’t which version Van Halen is the better one. The argument is that if Roth had remained, Van Halen would probably have a few more platinum selling albums in the 80s before their fan base began to dwindle along with the Poisons, Motley Crues and Ratts. David Lee Roth was excess personified, both on and off-record, and was quite content to remain so, as evidenced by his solo records, which mostly continued the party he started in Van Halen. His first two records (<i>Eat ‘Em and Smile </i>&amp; <i>Skyscraper </i>which sounded a <i>lot</i> like old school Van Halen albums) sold in big numbers. By the time the 90s rolled around, however, most of his fans had grown up and moved on, but he was still unwilling to let-go of his arrogant rock star persona and grow up along with them. Subsequent albums flopped. This provides a strong argument that, while Roth may have been the key to VH's initial superstardom, had he remained in the group, he would have been the catalyst to their downfall.<br /> <br /> And what would have become of Sammy Hagar if Roth had remained in the band? Before joining Van Halen, he had a fairly consistent solo career with a reputation as a pretty entertaining live performer. His albums were mostly successful, often going gold and sometimes platinum, but never approaching VH’s numbers. He had a minor hit here and there, the most enduring being his ode to speed, “I Can’t Drive 55.” But when public taste in hard rock began to change, only the biggest of the big (most notably, Metallica, Bon Jovi, Ozzy Osbourne, Guns ’N Roses, and Hagar-era Van Halen) roared into the 90s as though grunge never happened. Hagar’s pre-VH solo music is definitely a product of its time. He himself didn’t become more musically adventurous until he joined VH, which later helped his latter day solo career after he left, when he refashioned himself as a heavy metal Jimmy Buffet. It stands to reason that Hagar, having not hooked up with VH, would continue to be a fairly popular concert draw, but music-wise, he would have experienced a sizeable drop in record sales and popularity. In fact, while he continues to release solo albums on a regular basis, none of them have come close to equaling the sales of his VH albums, or even his 80s solo records.<br /> <br /> David Lee Roth’s inevitable 2007 reunion with Van Halen suddenly put the band back in the spotlight after nearly a decade away (VH’s ill-fated attempt to carry-on with Extreme’s Gary Cherone replacing Hagar). The reunion tour, in which the band played nothing but songs from the first six albums, was one of the most successful of the decade, which would never have been the case if Roth hadn’t split back in 1985. Long-time die-hards could look at this as sort of a vindication, an argument that the Roth-era Van Halen is untouchable, and the band simply picked up where they left off in 1984.<br /> <br /> There’s the age-old cliché, absence makes the heart grow fonder, especially in the first dozen years of the new century. Legends from the 60s (Cream), 70s (Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath), 80s (Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, The Cars, The Police) and 90s (Stone Temple Pilots, Faith No More, Soundgarden) have regrouped (either permanently or for one-off shows/tours). For the most part, they've been welcomed back with open arms, mostly by those nostalgic for an era when rock music dominated the sales charts, concert halls and airwaves. <br /> <br /> Van Halen are currently huge once again, having released the first Roth-era album in 28 years, <i>A Different Kind of Truth</i>, which literally <i>does</i> pick up where they left off in 1984. Many of the 'new' songs sprouted from demos dating as far back as 1978. But rather than being written off as dinosaurs, Van Halen have enjoyed some of the greatest praise of their entire career by returning to the sound which made them famous to begin with. But this doesn't necessarily make them musically relevant again. This is an album that, while debuting at #2 on the Billboard charts, is more a testament to the dedication of its 40-50-something fans than anything else. Hard rock isn't currently doing too well in the music business, so&nbsp;it'll be very interesting to see what happens with Van Halen once the novelty of Roth's return has worn off.</span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/c7emZ40UPXs" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/04/van-halen-vs.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-3401472525636590982012-04-12T21:06:00.000-07:002012-04-12T21:06:40.472-07:00Kitten Kibbles<span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4r2oUbr_XA0/T4ek6BABnZI/AAAAAAAAATo/wMSLdfYSM-8/s1600/thumbnail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4r2oUbr_XA0/T4ek6BABnZI/AAAAAAAAATo/wMSLdfYSM-8/s1600/thumbnail.jpg" /></a></div>Due to the number of hits I've been getting on my recent Dave's Movie Guide posts, I've started a new blogsite exclusively for those, imaginatively titled, Dave's Movie Guide. </span><a href="http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/"><u><span style="color: blue;"><span lang="EN">http://davesmovieguide.blogspot.com/</span></span></u><span style="color: blue;"></span></a><span lang="EN"> That's where you'll find more reviews of the classic &amp; not-so-classic movies I have felt compelled to write about.</span><br /><br />I think it would be funny to dress up as an airline pilot, find a corner booth in an airport lounge and start slamming back martinis. Then, after about an hour, check my watch, slap my head and slur, "Oh crap! I'm late for the Fresno run!" <br /><br />I'm sad to say neither of my young adult books (<i>Killer Cows </i>&amp; <i>Shaken</i>) is selling too well right now. Both have been getting good reviews, but it's been damned hard getting the word out about them. Doubly frustrating is numerous websites have requested free copies for review, but few of them have followed-through. I share the same disappointment as fellow Echelon authors have recently expressed regarding this. I dunno, I always believed people should come-through on their promises, or not make promises to begin with. As it stands, I gave out a lot of free copies of <i>Shaken</i> for no reason whatsoever. If I'd have known the outcome of my efforts, I'd have given those copies to my friends.<br /><br />Being someone who is snobbish enough to automatically rebel against something that becomes massively popular, I have to admit <i>The Hunger Games </i>is one of the best books I've read over the past few years. In fact, once I finished it (in one night), I couldn't wait to see the movie, even though it's the biggest piece of cinematic pop culture since <i>Twilight</i>. On the other hand, once I opened up a recent issue of People magazine, which presented the results of a dumbass <i>Team Peeta vs. Team Gale </i>pole, I wanted to puke. <em>What the hell does Team</em> (insert name here)<em> even freaking mean, anyway!?!</em> It's a goddamned movie, not a platform through which to declare your adoring allegiance to some teenaged hottie.<br /><br />Feeling bored? Try challenging a total stranger to a pillow fight.<br /><br />Am I the only one who will mourn the day when all forms of physical media (CDs, DVDs, books) are a thing of the past?<br /><br />I just watched <i>Titanic</i> with my seven year old daughter, and at the end, even <i>she</i> wondered why Rose didn't just scoot over to let Jack out of the freezing water.<br /><br />I'm starting to get irritated at the number of my Facebook friends who use the network to spew their political leanings by posting 'clever' photos slamming this guy-or-that-guy, this-policy-or-that-policy, with the presumption that all of <i>their</i> Facebook friends share the same opinions. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QYGrUZnxVOM/T4elR2P256I/AAAAAAAAATw/UiyBTouEfvo/s1600/american.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="124" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QYGrUZnxVOM/T4elR2P256I/AAAAAAAAATw/UiyBTouEfvo/s200/american.png" width="200" /></a></div>Has anyone else ever noticed that <i>American Idol </i>voting results are only considered worthy of being included on nightly news broadcasts by the same channels that also <i>air</i> the show?<br /><br />Why are so many people still debating whether or not those New Orleans Saints players and coaches involved in the bounty scandal should be banned from the NFL for life, while Michael Vick was welcome back with open arms?<br /><br />Once I finish building my time machine, I plan to go back, find the first person who decided people should get up as early as possible to go to their jobs, and kill him.<br /><br />I'm a teacher, and my district is threatening to go on strike, which has recently been reported in the local news. It's amazing how many people, most of whom haven't set foot in a classroom in decades, suddenly think they know everything about my profession. Maybe I should select one of them, show up where they work and say, "Hey, buddy...I think you should do the same thing for a thousand bucks less per month. I know all about your job because I shopped-in-your-store/drove-by-your-factory once, so I know you don't work that hard."<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/mE7ZSQDeB-w" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/04/kitten-kibbles.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-69010286130049751112012-03-31T12:47:00.000-07:002012-03-31T12:47:55.575-07:00Dawn of the Dead (1978)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fKOAi4sIrHk/T3dfW4_BxpI/AAAAAAAAASY/M8aj2NOyfYY/s1600/dawn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fKOAi4sIrHk/T3dfW4_BxpI/AAAAAAAAASY/M8aj2NOyfYY/s1600/dawn.jpg" /></a></div>1979 was a watershed year in my young life as a movie geek...<i>Alien</i> was the scariest movie since <i>Jaws</i>, I managed to sit through all of <i>Gone with the Wind </i>on TV without falling asleep, and best of all, I witnessed a movie make a kid so sick that he ran out of the theater, but not before vomiting all over the place. <br /><br />The offending flick was George A. Romero’s classic, <i>Dawn of the Dead</i>. It’s hapless victim was one Mark J. Fortner.<br /><br />When I first saw a commercial advertising <i>Dawn of the Dead, </i>man, did I want to see it! As a 15-year-old horror fan, nothing gets you more pumped-up than a movie ad that ominously announces the film is so violent that it has no MPAA rating. On the same token, nothing shoots the wind out of your 15-year-old sails faster than the addendum in the same ad which states ‘no one under 17 will be admitted.’ Period. <br /><br /><i>Goddammit!</i><br /><i></i><br />Worse yet, since most places wouldn’t book any unrated movie (which is still true today), <i>Dawn of the Dead </i>would likely not be shambling into any mall theater in the ‘burbs (kind of ironic, once you're aware of the plot). <br /><br />Sure enough, it only played in one college theater downtown for a few weeks, and even though I often snuck into R rated movies at the Southgate Theater near my house, I was 100% sure I couldn’t talk my parents into driving me downtown and tag along while I enjoyed some zombie gut-munching (although imagining the horrified face of my mother gasping at the carnage does bring a smile to my face). Alas, I had to settle for reading about <em>Dawn's</em> gory glory in the pages of <i>Fangoria</i>.<br /><br />Then, a few months later, a miracle happened. <i>Dawn of the Dead </i>popped up as the bottom half of a double bill (with <i>Phantasm</i>) at the trusty old Cinema V, an ugly, ancient, puke-colored, second-run theater in downtown Milwaukie, the suburb where I lived and only a ten minute drive from my house. I’d gone there many times, mostly when my allowance money was running low but still needed my movie fix. The admission price was always only 69 cents for as long as I could remember, and that was for <i>two movies</i>! 69 CENTS was perpetually plastered on its cracked and weathered marquee at least five times bigger than the movie titles themselves. In fact, most of us had been calling the place Cinema 69 for years. <br /><br />At any rate, even though the place was old, dank and had a big slit in the screen no one bothered to repair, it was pretty awesome to be able to catch a movie just by rummaging through the sofa cushions for loose change. Even better was the fact that Cinema V <i>never </i>checked IDs. I couldn’t believe it: the mother of all zombie flicks, 69 cents, no ID check. The stars must have aligned that weekend in 1979.<br /><br />God bless the second-run theater, an endangered species nowadays. There’s hardly any of them around anymore. As it becomes cheaper and more convenient to simply watch movies at home, one by one, these theaters are dropping like zombies being shot in the head. That’s too bad, because there’s still nothing like catching a flick on the big screen.<br /><br />Oh sure, some still exist in major cities, but usually only after rechristening themselves as theater-pubs, where hipsters congregate to pretend they enjoy beers that tastes like socks, or cinema-arcades to train young kids the fine art of gambling (offering them tickets for successful game play, which can later be exchanged for trinkets worth far less than the number of coins they spent to get those tickets). Even the old Cinema V is now one of these, it's once-spacious auditorium now chopped in half to make room for Skee-Ball and Whack-A-Mole. Movies alone are seldom enough to keep these places in business, even with an admission price less than a glorified milkshake from Starbucks. There are still a few second-run cinemas left (<i>not</i> art houses...those are for people who pretend they like foreign films) offering just movies, but I think it is just a matter of time before they are all gone. That’ll be a sad day.<br /><br />Maybe I’m a hopeless romantic (euphemism for old fart). I truly believe all movies are best on the big screen, yet I am also someone who is increasingly unwilling to roll the dice and shell out 80 bucks (admission for my family, plus popcorn and a few sodas) unless I am almost guaranteed to enjoy the film I’m mortgaging my house for. But as a true fan of the moviegoing experience, second-run theaters always gave me the same opportunity at a fraction of the price. <br /><br />But that's now. Back in '79, all I cared about was hopping on my bike and pedaling into Milwaukie that summer afternoon with my best friend Clay (more on him later) and our sort-of friend Mark Fortner. <br /><br />I say 'sort-of' because Mark was more of a friend out of proximity; he and his family moved into our neighborhood the previous year. He was a nice enough guy, but a clean-cut, goody-two-shoes who went to a private school. He had a stupid sense of humor and often said the dorkiest thing at the most inappropriate moments. The guy wore thick glasses, always tucked in his shirt and acted like he just committed the perfect crime whenever an expletive escaped his lips. In other words, not cool, as defined by me and Clay. His dad, a pediatrician, was also a piece of work. He looked and talked like Ward Cleaver and had the dumbest laugh I'd ever heard in my life. One time, while we were all playing in the driveway, Dr. Fortner popped his head out the door and, with a congenial grin and stupid laugh, said, "Hey gang, be careful not to hit the garage door with that basketball."<br /><br />Me and Clay stared at each other, barely suppressing laughter. <br /><br />Gang? <i>Gang? </i>What were we, the Little Rascals? Who the hell called kids gang back then? Me and Clay were merciless, mocking his dumbass dad, yet Mark took it like a good sport, because it was obvious he wanted to fit in with his new friends, but had little idea how. He'd buy Led Zeppelin records just because we did, even though his personal preference in music was never that heavy. When he tore the brown paper wrapping off of his new copy of Zeppelin’s <i>In Through the Out Door</i>, we gave him a lot of shit because the brown paper bag wasn’t wrapping; it the <i>album</i> <i>cover</i>.<br /><br />Looking back, we weren't too nice to Mark himself most of the time. The neighborhood we lived in was still in development, so there were always several houses at various stages of construction. We played in those structures a lot, often engaging in our favorite activity, dirt clod fights. The rules were simple...divide into teams and try to nail each other. We introduced Mark to this sport on the first weekend in his new house. In his effort to make new friends, he was up for it, but once I had him cornered in a ditch surrounding a house-in-development, he let his true colors fly. He was a sitting duck and he knew it. I stood over him above the ditch, arm cocked and ready to let the rock-filled dirt clod fly. Clay was nearby, giggling uncontrollably as he urged me to make the kill-shot (and he was on Mark's team). At this point, Mark started to cry. That made Clay laugh even harder, which was all the encouragement I needed to open fire. I missed, by the way, which was probably a good thing. Although we loved dirt clod fights, none of us really wanted to hurt each other. Mark was already bawling when my projectile exploded next to his head. I’d hate to think what would have happened if I’d nailed him.<br /><br />Clay would later swear up and down Mark wet his pants while cowered in that ditch. Whether or not that was actually true didn't dissuade me from relaying that detail as the climax to the story when I told others.<br /><br />Yeah, we were often pretty shitty to Mark, but that’s not to say we didn’t like him. Despite his social awkwardness (at least defined by us), Mark was a pretty nice guy. And, God bless him, he put up with a lot of shit just so he could be included with the neighborhood cool kids (also defined by us). We never objected to having the guy around, especially in the summer, since he was the only kid in the neighborhood with a pool.<br /><br />So when me and Clay decided to pedal down to the Cinema V to check out <i>Dawn of the Dead</i>, Mark wanted to go, too. That was fine with us.<br /><br />Mark’s dad, however, had some initial reservations when he asked for permission. <i>Permission? Really? Couldn’t he just lie and go anyway?</i><br /><i></i><br />Mark’s dad warily shook his head. “I don’t know. I heard Cinema V is a shady place.” <br /><br /><i>Shady place? </i>It was an old theater, not a freaking strip club. And who the hell described any place as <i>shady</i> anymore? We never let Mark live that one down either.<br /><br />Still, Mark was able to convince his dad to let him go, conveniently leaving out the fact we were going to see an unrated zombie movie. I didn’t actually tell my parents, either. Mom had already once forbidden me from seeing the main feature, <i>Phantasm,</i> during its initial run because of the tag line, ‘If this one doesn’t scare you, you’re already dead.’ Maybe Mark himself didn’t know or care what we were seeing; he was just happy to be included.<br /><br />So we got there, bought popcorn and settled into the front row of the balcony (remember those?). The place was pretty full, mostly with a bunch of other kids whose IDs were obviously not checked at the door.<br /><br /><i>Dawn of the Dead </i>is director George A. Romero’s sequel to his 1968 classic, <i>Night of the Living Dead</i>. Although released a decade later, <i>Dawn</i> picks up shortly after the events of the first film, only now the living dead have overrun the world. Two SWAT guys, a chopper pilot and his girlfriend escape in a helicopter and eventually find refuge in a shopping mall. After ridding the place of zombies, they barricade themselves in and proceed to live out the fantasy most of us have entertained at some point...having a whole mall to yourself. This idyllic existence is later disrupted when a gang of bikers lay siege upon the mall, allowing the zombies back in. Our heroes, now down to two, manage to escape, but the film ends with their ultimate fates unknown. <br /><br />That’s the quick &amp; dirty summary. Much has been written over the years about the film’s obvious satiric commentary on consumerism, that the zombies themselves are not the true monsters...<i>we</i> are, devolving into animals once society has broken down and can no longer keep us in check. All that and a thousand more metaphors are exploited in the movie’s 127 minutes (epic length for a horror movie, but the <i>Dawn</i> never feels that long). <br /><br />But none of the movie’s social commentary matters when you’re 15 years old and exposed to some of the most graphic violence you’ve ever seen. People are eaten alive, whole chunks of flesh bitten out of bodies; skulls are severed by helicopter blades, screwdrivers are thrust into temples, head literally explode from gunshots, zombie-rendered children are gunned down, etc. This wasn’t just violence...this was <i>gore</i>.<br /><br />While we were taking all of this in, it quickly became obvious <i>Dawn of the Dead </i>was not the kind of movie Mark was used to watching. Me either, actually, but at least I’d been working up to it, having survived <i>Jaws, The Exorcist, The Omen </i>and <i>Alien</i>. But the violence in <i>Dawn</i> was way, <i>way</i> beyond any of that. And here was Mark, whose maximum exposure to movie mayhem was probably seeing Krypton exploding in the original <i>Superman</i>. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-t4DAFCB8qP4/T3anvfRq-dI/AAAAAAAAASQ/W_uTYMoURb0/s1600/dawn2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" closure_uid_qzfkvk="3" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-t4DAFCB8qP4/T3anvfRq-dI/AAAAAAAAASQ/W_uTYMoURb0/s1600/dawn2.jpg" /></a></div><br />During much of <i>Dawn</i>, Mark was green in the gills, but managed to man-up and tough it out, at least until the climax, when the aforementioned biker gang starts getting ripped apart and dismembered by the zombie hordes. Torsos are torn open, intestines are spilled and devoured, arms and pulled from their sockets, all while the victims are still alive. I have to admit, even I was getting a little queasy. But Mark couldn’t handle it. At the height of the biker slaughter, he leaned forward, eyes squeezed shut. He lurched a few times, clutching his stomach, then loudly spewed massive amounts of projectile vomit into the air. Since we were seated in the front row of the balcony, his stomach chowder rained down in chunks and splattered people twenty feet below us.<br /><br />I heard screams. Mark, grabbing his midsection, stumbled toward the exit.<br /><br />Clay was laughing his ass off.<br /><br />While the movie kept playing, I leaned over to see puke-drenched people standing up in revulsion, hands outstretched in disbelief. Several of them also bolted from the theater, others stared up accusingly at me and Clay. We did our best to look like we had no idea what was going on.<br /><br />By this time, the stench of Mark’s puke wafted to my nose. That, along with the disembowelment going on onscreen, made my own gut to a few summersaults. Thank God I managed to swallow it back down, because I knew this was yet-another socially awkward event Mark would ever live down. I sure as hell didn’t want to join him as an object of ridicule. The only other time in my life I ever came that close to puking because of a movie was when I first saw <i>Jackass</i>.<br /><br />As the end credits of <i>Dawn of the Dead </i>rolled, a few Cinema V cronies came into the theater to clean up the mess below. The manager stormed up to the balcony and demanded to know who was responsible, which is kind of stupid when you think about it. Who the hell goes out of their way to puke on paying customers? Me and Clay had since moved to another section of the balcony, acting like persona non grata, so he paid us no attention.<br /><br />After a lengthy delay, the main feature, <i>Phantasm</i>, finally began. Having cleaned himself up and looking a bit less green, Mark eventually came back up and sat with us, and we all watched the movie in relative silence. <i>Phantasm </i>wasn’t a bad movie, but not very scary and, aside from a great scene involving a flying silver ball drilling into someone’s head, kind of anticlimactic after the zombie carnage of <i>Dawn of the Dead</i>.<br /><br />Today, <i>Dawn of the Dead </i>is a classic and widely considered the greatest zombie film of all time. For years it was the most gloriously violent thing I’d ever seen, and when it later came out on video I used to love watching it with newbies who had no idea what was coming. The film immediately spawned countless imitations, many spewing out of Italy, that often upped the ante in the gore department. Some were okay, most were shit, but <i>Dawn</i> just got better with each viewing, mainly because it was never just a gore film (even though that’s what I first loved about it as a kid). It’s a smartly-written, well-acted and sometimes vicious attack on materialism that’s as morbidly funny as it is scary. Even the ample amount of over-the-top zombie violence is actually easier to stomach than the realistic torture scenes in <i>Hostel</i> or the <i>Saw</i> series.<br /><br />As for Mark, he managed to survive, though we gave him a lot of shit for puking up his popcorn and, as usual, he took our chiding with a good-natured grin. For all of his social inadequacies, the guy was a damn good sport, and because of that, maybe he was a better friend than we ever gave him credit for.<br /><br />Mark and I kind of drifted apart shortly after I discovered girls, cars, booze and weed, while he continued taking school seriously and was a valedictorian his senior year. Shortly after I (barely) graduated high school, I think it was his younger brother who told me Mark got a full scholarship to USC or something. I, on the other hand, dropped out of community college to marry my girlfriend (but that’s another sad tale). Obviously, his encounter with the living dead at the Cinema V didn’t do any permanent damage, but I’ll bet he’s still not a zombie fan.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/NCsmhvBOjnM" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/03/dawn-of-dead-1978.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-89616519347690202872012-03-27T15:43:00.002-07:002012-03-28T14:13:21.788-07:00Dave's Movie Guide: The Swarm (1978)<span lang="EN"></span><br /><span lang="EN"></span><br /><span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ldwmM2gvo3A/T3JBsEWpChI/AAAAAAAAAQQ/Rps_lRuQhW4/s1600/swarm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ldwmM2gvo3A/T3JBsEWpChI/AAAAAAAAAQQ/Rps_lRuQhW4/s1600/swarm.jpg" /></a></div>A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, when drugs were still cool, I knew a guy named Scott, who spent most of his high school years in a pot-induced haze. Scott was the typical likeable stoner present in every high school, likeable because he had an endless supply of weed he was willing to share with anyone in the room at the time he decided to load a bowl. Hence, I hung out with him a lot.<br /><br />Scott was also a closet scientist, a trait which only came to the surface when he was high. He wouldn’t do jack-shit in biology class, but was more-than-willing to conduct experiments with the able assistance of Panama Red. Baking in his garage one night while his parents were out of town (which was often), me and a few buddies heard Scott’s theory about digestion. He put-forth that corn kernels showed up in shit because they weren’t chewed up enough, so it stood to reason that if you swallowed a sardine whole, you’d have a turd sprouting fins in the toilet bowl a few hours later. We never discovered if his hypothesis was true - though we <i>did</i> manage to get him to swallow a whole fish without killing himself - because, like most people in our condition, the overwhelming urge to crash in front of the TV with a box of Apple Jacks outweighed the need to carry on in the name of science.<br /><br />Nobody had cable back then, although HBO was becoming available to the few willing to stick a dildo-shaped antenna on their roof. Scott’s parents weren’t among that group, so the only thing this night on TV was <i>The Swarm</i>, Irwin Allen’s 1978 killer bee epic. I saw the movie when it first came out, and even then I knew this was one of the movies which essentially killed the disaster movie craze in the 70s. But it plays a lot better when you’re high. When you’re high, the lousy special effects take on a surreal look, and there’s plenty of dull stretches in between the attack scenes to run back out into the garage and fire up another bowl. There’s also the tendency to seriously ponder whether or not a swarm of bees could actually cause a train to derail or a nuclear power plant to explode. Sober folks wouldn’t engage in such a debate. They know better.<br /><br />Though we had abandoned the sardine-in-your-shit experiment, we did manage to come up with a few other conclusions, even if the Scientific Method was no longer foremost on our minds. One fact we discovered was that Michael Caine (and his goofy hair, one of God’s crueller jokes) isn’t someone you should watch when you’re doing drugs. His performance in <i>The Swarm</i>, with his deadly-serious delivery of dialogue that makes the average <i>Godzilla</i> movie sound like the prose of Tennessee Williams, had me convinced he was trying to mess with my head. Not to mention his eyes, which were kinda freaking me out that night. And when he pulled out his trusty pouch of sunflower seeds, it had Rick (one of the other guys hanging out that night) wanting to head to 7-Eleven to buy a bag of his own. Fortunately, he couldn’t find his car keys.<br /><br />We also discovered Scott was willing to have sex with anything...even Olivia De Havilland, who in <i>The Swarm </i>plays an elderly school principal in being courted by geezers Ben Johnson and Fred MacMurray. <i>Yeech</i>.<br /><br />“Man, I’d do her,” Scott stated matter-of-factly.<br /><br />“<i>What?</i>” replied Greg, the other guy in our cannibus crew in between handfuls of dry Apple Jacks. “She’s a thousand years old and 300 pounds! I suppose you’d do that military dude, too.”<br /><br />“Richard Widmark,” I interjected, being the only movie geek in the bunch.<br /><br />“Whatever.”<br /><br />Scott ignored my clarification of the film’s cast and said to Greg, “Yeah, but dude, if she was the only chick around and the lights were off and you were baked enough...” (It was at this point I realized career stoners probably <i>would</i> have sex with anything). Then he looked at me. “Dave, you’d do her if there was no one else around, wouldn’t ya?”<br /><br />“Maybe if she was the <i>Gone with the Wind </i>Olivia De Havilland,” I replied.<br /><br />“<i>Gone with the Wind</i>? That’s my <i>grandma’s</i> favorite movie!” Scott started laughing uncontrollably, apparently enjoying the punchline to a joke only he understood. At this point in the film, the killer bees caused a train carrying much of the cast - including Olivia - to tumble down a mountain in a fiery blaze, thus ending the debate whether or not she was do-able. Besides...it was time to go back out to Scott’s garage to refuel during the commercial break.<br /><br />Speaking of Olivia De Havilland, her role in the <i>The Swarm </i>has absolutely no impact on the plot at all. She’s introduced in a few pointless scenes before plummeting to her death into a canyon. You could take out every frame she appears in and she wouldn’t be missed at all. You could say that about half of this ‘all-star’ cast...Slim Pickens, Lee Grant, Richard Chamberlain, Patti Duke (in a hilariously random scene of blooming love for her physician, even though her husbad <em>just died</em>!), Jose Ferrer, Ben Johnson, Fred MacMurray...all included for no other reason than to boost <i>The Swarm’s </i>marquee value. Hell, it worked for Allen’s <i>The Towering Inferno</i>. Surely it’d work again, right?<br /><br />But the difference is that, despite its cornball melodrama, <i>The Towering Inferno </i>is actually a good movie, mainly because Irwin Allen only directed the action scenes. He left the ones involving <i>real</i> actors to John Guillermin. In addition, even though a large portion of the cast pop-up in for little-more than glorified cameos, we care about their characters enough so that when one dies horribly, at least the audience <i>feels</i> something. Not so with <i>The Swarm</i>, the first of Irwin Allen’s disaster films in which he handled all directorial chores. This is where we realize that this ‘Master of Disaster’, as he was so fondly called when the genre was at its peak, really had no inherent filmmaking talent of his own. The gratuitous cameos are often so random and out-of-place that (along with some of the worst dialogue ever uttered in a big-budget film) you can’t help but laugh. And seeing it today, once you throw it the shoddy special effects, you have one of the most unintentionally funny films of all time. Imagine if Ed Wood (<i>Plan 9 from Outer Space</i>) was given an unlimited budget, access to major (if long-in-the-tooth) Hollywood stars, and a script written by a bunch of hacks from a community college creative writing class, all working on individual scenes without knowing what the other writers are doing. Put all that together and you end up with a film almost shocking in its technical and narrative ineptitude.<br /><br />And it’s for all those reasons that <i>The Swarm </i>is so damned fun. It’s one of those rare birds...a film with a gigantic budget and a huge cast, squandered by a hack once revered for creating a genre, only to destroy that genre (and his reputation) by believing all the media hype the bestowed him. And <i>The Swarm </i>was definitely the biggest nail in the disaster movie coffin. But for one film to single-handedly destroy a genre, it must be worth seeing. As such, <i>The Swarm </i>does not disappoint. <br /><br />A few years later, <i>Airplane! </i>was released, effectively exploiting every disaster movie cliche for laughs and killing the genre for the next two decades. But now that both <i>Airplane! </i>and <i>The Swarm </i>are thirty-year-old relics, try watching the two of them back-to-back today. Both are still hilarious, but for different reasons. <i>Airplane! </i>is still funny, but because it knowingly parodies a genre popular of the time, many of its most hilarious moments may be lost on modern audiences. But <i>The Swarm</i>, by virtue of its sheer seriousness and ineptitude, is even funnier and far more entertaining. One only has to view Richard Widmark’s performance to appreciate that. Here’s a guy whose been a reliable co-star or villain his entire career, applying the same earnestness to this role that he always had, only saddled with some of the dumbest lines in the film. As General Slater, he’s asked to repeatedly suspect the motives of Bradford Crane (Michael Caine), who has done nothing but help resolve the killer bee situation, yet Slater still orders his second-in-command (Bradford Dillman) to ‘build up a dossier’ on the scientist. To what end? Does Slater <i>really</i> think Crane is in league with the bees? It’s to Widmark’s credit that he approaches the role with the same seriousness he once did in <i>Kiss of Death</i>. <br /><br />It’s also to Caine’s credit that, even though he sometimes looks like he knows this was the worst film he’d ever signed on for at the time, he never offers a knowing wink over the ridiculousness of the story, nor does he look like he’s about to lose his lunch with the next stupid line he’s forced to utter. If that’s true, I can’t <i>begin</i> to imagine the raging gorge he made himself swallow when doing <i>Jaws: The Revenge</i>.<br /><br />On an awesome footnote, though, <em>The Swarm</em> offers something no other disaster film did at the time. You know the perky/smart-aleck/adorable kid who pops up in every one of these movies, the ones you wished would die but never do? Well, in <em>The Swarm</em>, that kid dies. It's supposed to be a tragic moment in the film (swelling music, crying doctor at his death bed), until you remember that this little bastard was also responsible for several hundred deaths because he just <em>had </em>to taunt the bees.<br /><br />Simply put, <i>The Swarm </i>may be the greatest bad movie of all time...more fun than a barrel of <i>Twilight</i> movies. <br /><br />I bought <i>The Swarm </i>when it came out on DVD, and have watched and enjoyed it more than any of Irwin Allen’s other films. Allen himself died in 1991, and no, I wasn’t invited to the funeral, so I imagine the eulogy covered his greatest successes (<i>The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno</i>, Allen’s various TV shows in the 60s). Too bad, because, as much as I love <i>Poseidon</i> and <i>Inferno</i>, they aren’t as much dumbass fun as <i>The Swarm</i>.<br /><br />Regarding the night me and my buddies baked ourselves in front of the TV back then, I eventually lost touch with Scott. Like a lot of stoner buddies from many of us may recall fondly, he’s got no Facebook page, nor have I seen him at any reunions. I dunno, maybe he’s still in front of his TV, lusting after Olivia De Havilland. I only hope he’s a little more sober, and being so, perhaps checked out some of De Havilland’s older movies, when she was certainly younger and hotter than she was in <i>The Swarm</i>.</span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/knp4Wy0uslk" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/03/daves-movie-guide-swarm-1978.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-8040604814258769702012-03-26T14:18:00.002-07:002012-03-27T13:33:01.183-07:00Dave's Movie Guide: Damnation Alley (1977)<span lang="EN"></span><br /><span lang="EN"></span><br /><span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uyXivVpb5xA/T3DcIsb_vnI/AAAAAAAAAQI/ywLlYSgJYfU/s1600/damnation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uyXivVpb5xA/T3DcIsb_vnI/AAAAAAAAAQI/ywLlYSgJYfU/s1600/damnation.jpg" /></a></div>This movie has the dubious distinction of being the movie I’ve seen in a theater more times than any other. Not because it’s any good, or that I’m a big fan of Jan Michael Vincent (who the hell is?), but because when I was a kid I hung out at a theater called the Southgate, a quad cinema with a pretty relaxed security policy; you could easily sneak from theater to theater and see all four movies after paying for only one. Me and my friends thought we were pretty clever, but with hindsight, I doubt the theater management actually cared, so long as they were selling popcorn. <br /><br />Just about everyone I knew went to the Southgate every weekend to bump into people of the opposite sex (okay, it wasn’t exactly Studio 54, but we were 13, and it was within biking distance). Back then, long before home video or digital downloading, movies played in theaters a lot longer than they generally do now. One of those movies was <i>Damnation Alley.</i><br /><br />Don’t remember this one? Allow me to enlighten you. <em>Damnation Alley,</em> based on a novel by Roger Zalanzy, is a post-apocalyptic ‘epic’ that was supposed to be the bigger blockbuster of the two sci-fi movies 20<sup>th</sup> Century Fox released that year (the other one was <i>Star Wars, </i>which the bigwigs at Fox apparently had no faith in). And even though <i>Damnation Alley </i>had a much bigger budget than <i>Star Wars</i>, it turned out to be a truly cheesy end-of-the-world movie in which a few survivors of a nuclear war trek across the country in a weird looking, armed-to-the-teeth, multi-wheeled tank called the Landmaster. As&nbsp;dumb as the movie is, I gotta admit the Landmaster is a pretty badass vehicle, making&nbsp;the Humvee look like a SmartCar.&nbsp;It would sure come in handy today&nbsp;during my frequent bouts of road rage (<em>get off your goddamn phone or I'll shove a rocket up your ass!</em>). By the way, the original Landmaster built for the film still exists in storage somewhere. <br /><br />Also of note is Sound 360, an audio gimmick ballyhooed in <em>Damnation Alley</em> trailers the same way Sensurround was for movies like <em>Earthquake</em>. Sound 360 was a multi-channel system which supposedly created an audio experience allowing the viewer to feel like they were in the middle of the action. Which is all fine and good, provided one <em>wants</em> to be in the middle of the action. Today, such gimmicks as Sensurround and Sound 360 can easily be replicated by any home theater system, but back then, I suspect they were used to convince moviegoers they were&nbsp;paying to watch a better movie than they really were. Kind of like the use of 3-D today. Sorry folks, if you need any technical assistance&nbsp;to enjoy&nbsp;a movie, than said-movie wasn't any good to begin with.<br /><br />Anyway,&nbsp;<em>Damnation Alley</em>&nbsp;played at the Southgate for about two months, and since our other choices at the time consisted of stuff like <i>The Goodbye Girl </i>and <i>Annie Hall </i>(a fine film, but Woody Allen’s brand of humor is sort of lost on 14 year olds), me and my friends ended up watching <i>Damnation Alley </i>a lot. It was part of a double-bill (back then your ticket allowed you to watch two movies) with <i>Wizards</i>, a sleazy and stupid animated fantasy flick that once duped people into thinking director Ralph Bakshi had talent. On the plus side, that was the first cartoon I ever saw where the female characters had nipples.<br /><br />Speaking of nipples, on about my fifth or sixth viewing on <i>Damnation Alley</i>, I bumped into a girl from my school named&nbsp;Shelly Joslin, who was there with one of her friends.&nbsp;Shelly had the honored distinction of having the biggest boobs in the 8<sup>th</sup> grade, which I actually got to touch in the back row of Southgate’s auditorium #2. While George Peppard and Jan Michael Vincent battled legions of killer cockroaches on the screen, I had my trembling hand up a girl’s blouse for the first time. <br /><br />What does copping my first feel have to do with the movie? Not a damn thing, but whenever I fondly recall <i>Damnation Alley</i>, I don’t think of the ludicrous story, dumb pseudo-science or shoddy special effects that might have been impressive in 1960. I don’t think about the film’s characters&nbsp;being able&nbsp;travel across a radioactive wasteland without being covered in pus-oozing lesions, or, other than some stock footage of nuclear explosions, we actually see nothing destroyed. I don’t think about the ridiculous notion that the city of Albany survives unscathed, with white picket fences and green trees intact. I don’t think about Jackie Earl Haley, who played the young punk from <i>The Bad News Bears</i>, and stretches himself here by playing another young punk. No, when I think of <i>Damnation Alley</i>, I still think of only one thing...<i>Shelly Joslin’s boobs</i>. Actually, that’s <i>two</i> things, isn’t it?</span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/_m75fiaVQ8Q" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/03/daves-movie-guide-damnation-alley-1977.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-21763408061605872322012-03-23T19:40:00.002-07:002012-03-24T17:05:20.743-07:00Dave's Movie Guide: Mr. Holland's Opus (1995)<span lang="EN"></span><br /><span lang="EN"></span><br /><span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bklaozWWEp0/T20s-uTmD9I/AAAAAAAAAQA/0RY7kQ08eus/s1600/holland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bklaozWWEp0/T20s-uTmD9I/AAAAAAAAAQA/0RY7kQ08eus/s1600/holland.jpg" /></a></div>Being that&nbsp;I first saw this movie in the middle of trying to earn my teaching degree, it did not inspire me to actually <em>become</em> a teacher, though it undoubtedly inspired others. <i>Mr. Holland’s Opus </i>is a pretty damned inspirational movie, and a refreshing (for the 90s) look at a teacher who is <i>not</i> some nube who takes a job in an urban hellhole to single-handedly turn a&nbsp;herd of gang-bangers into scholars. One thing the movie does do is make teaching look like a noble and ultimately rewarding profession. <br /><br /><em>Noble?</em> I don’t know. After all, despite Hollywood’s historically romantic image of the teaching profession, it is still just a job. Most teachers I know look more forward to summer breaks than molding fresh young minds. <em>Rewarding?</em> Sometimes. There are occasional moments when you know you've done something to steer a kid's life in the right direction.<br /><br />The job is sometimes pretty interesting, too. I teach seventh graders, who are an odd lot; half of them still play with Legos, the other half are already getting their freak on at school dances, dry-humping each other on the dance floor before one of us has to turn the hose on them. In fact, whenever I tell someone what grade I teach, I often get looks of sympathy.<br /><br />But like any job, there are downsides. There’s the usual stuff you hear in the news like budget problems, class sizes, violence, teachers as scapegoats for all the problems in schools. There are also a hell of a lot of people in the community who haven’t set foot in a classroom since they graduated, but think <i>they</i> know a lot more about your job than you do. <br /><br />I’m also amazed every year at the number of parents who, even though their kids have been disrespectful bastards and failed every class for years, are convinced their child’s <i>teachers</i> are collectively conspiring against him. Then there are the parents who haven’t given a damn about their kid’s behavior or academic performance all year, but are the first to scream bloody murder when a teacher says or does something they don’t like. A few years ago I caught a boy hugging a female student in the hall (which is not allowed where I teach), and he got pissed off at <i>me</i> for catching him breaking the rules. He’d already been written up several times previously, but according to him, being caught was my fault. He accused me to singling him out and got pretty damn disrespectful. This pissed me off because I’d always gotten along with the kid until then, and even let some of his behavior slide on occasion. When I took him aside, I berated him for his disrespect, saying I had cut him a “shitload of slack” in the past. Yes, the word <i>shit </i>slipped out. Hey, teachers aren’t perfect, but they are expected to be. Anyway, I wrote him up for his infraction, but not even two hours later I got a call from his mother, who was angry as hell that I said <i>shit</i>. Never mind that the kid had been failing every class, <i>all year</i>, and had been written at least a dozen referrals for his behavior by then. The only time she called to express <i>any</i> concern was when her boy heard the word <i>shit </i>coming from a teacher’s mouth. <br /><br />Then there was the time another male student wanted to use the restroom on a day a substitute teacher was filling in for me, but the kid had already used all of his passes. The sub followed procedure and refused…no pass, no exit from the class. The kid got defiant, then walked over to the trash can and pretended to piss in it, which apparently got a lot of laughs from the rest of the class. This kid also had a history of behavior problems, and was not what you’d call an academic all-star. Still, he sometimes tried hard enough that I bumped his D to a C so he could stay on the football team. When I returned to class the day after the incident, I wrote him up for his inappropriate behavior and had him call home. He got a hold of his mother and proceeded to blame <i>me</i> for not letting him use the bathroom (even though I wasn’t there and only reacting to the sub’s report). He conveniently left out the trashcan portion, and when she demanded to speak to me, she began with, “Listen, motherfucker…” before accusing me of picking on her son (even though I was the one responsible for keeping him on the football team) and not being sympathetic to his 'bladder condition'. By the way, there was nothing on-record with the school nurse about any bladder condition for this kid. <br /><br />When I explained he was being written up for pretending to piss in a trashcan, she replied, “Well, did he actually do it?” When I replied no, she went off on me again. I guess it’s okay to <i>pretend</i> to piss in a trashcan as long as you don’t actually whip it out. Yeah, try that<i> </i>at <i>your</i> job and see how long you stay employed.<br /><br />It’s stuff like that they do not prepare you for when training to become a teacher. Nor is this kind of stuff depicted in movies <i>about</i> teachers. Most movies featuring teachers fall under the following categories:<br /><ul><li>Teachers who are so righteous that their sainthood is all but guaranteed (<i>Goodbye Mr. Chips</i>). </li><li>Teachers who are villainous, indifferent and authoritative boobs worthy of audience ridicule (nearly every teen movie and rock video from the 80s).</li><li>New teachers so dedicated to their jobs that they buck the system and single-handedly change the lives of students who’d be in prison if it weren’t for their efforts (<i>Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers, Lean on Me, Take the Lead, Coach Carter, </i>ad nauseam). And of course, most movies which fall under that last category are “based on a true story”. </li><li>Teachers who have had enough, and are driven to use violent force in order to make things right (<i>The Substitute, The Principal, One Eight Seven, Class of 1984</i>). Actually, in the case of <i>The Substitute</i>, the main character, played with gusto by Tom Berenger, isn’t a real teacher; he’s mercenary who goes undercover at a Florida high school to find out who assaulted his girlfriend. But he does utter a line which damn near ever teacher I’ve ever met would love to lay on their students: “Fuck with me and you will face my wrath!”</li><li>Finally, there are those teachers who didn’t initially set-out to be teachers. Usually, they have loftier goals but must settle on something less. Only during the course of the movie do they truly discover the impact they have had on their kids, and now teaching is all they want to do. It’s also amazing how quickly most of these characters are able to attain a teaching license. I had to attended six years of college to attain the same credentials these characters apparently were able to bang-out in a weekend.</li></ul><em>Mr. Holland's Opus</em> falls under that last category. Richard Dreyfuss plays the title character, a musician with dreams of being a successful composer, but is forced to support his family by becoming a music teacher at an Oregon high school. He considers himself a musician, not a teacher, and hates the daily grind of being an educator and all that entails (troubled students, dealing with administrators, the conflict his job has&nbsp;with his ultimate goals). The film covers roughly 30 years of his teaching career, the whole time he’s thinking he’s been a failure, until he’s ultimately forced into retirement due to budget cuts. By now, teaching is all he wants to do. The film climaxes with a high school assembly, where nearly all of this former students whose lives he’s changed, show up to give tribute by performing the magnum opus he’d been working on for decades. Only then does Holland realize that his true calling wasn’t writing music; it was touching the lives of so many of his students, almost all of whom became successful adults, largely due to him.<br /><br />As a real teacher, I can safely say this film has almost no baring on real life. After 15 years as an educator, I’ve known dozens of teachers who have taught as long as Holland, and <i>none</i> of them were ever forced into retirement. They may have enjoyed their jobs, but most have gladly stepped down in order to enjoy their sunset years, free from the endless burden and responsibility of being an educator. In reality, teachers are just like everyone else in the workplace, doing their jobs as best they can before finally reaching that point in life when they happily leave it to someone else (perhaps some young rube romantically inspired by movies like <i>Mr. Holland’s Opus)</i><br /><br />But even after developing such a cynical view of the profession, I still love <i>Mr. Holland’s Opus</i>, a wonderfully sentimental film, impeccably acted (Dreyfuss earned a deserved Oscar nomination) and consistently entertaining despite its epic length. Who cares if it doesn't accurately reflect the profession? Such a film would be as intriguing as watching an accountant work his calculator. As a teacher, I'm sure as hell not gonna shell out any portion of my meager salary to watch some character&nbsp;spend his weekend correcting papers,&nbsp;or deal&nbsp;with indifferent students and parents,&nbsp;the latter of whom are&nbsp;looking for someone to blametheir kid's&nbsp;academic failure on anyone <i>except</i> the kid. I want to watch a teacher in a fantasy world, who manages to&nbsp;change the lives of every&nbsp;single student he ever had. In reality, that seldom happens, just like those who love porn will seldom, if ever,&nbsp;encounter a sexually-cavalier, hard-bodied&nbsp;nymph willing to submit to his every whim. <br /><br />I guess that makes <i>Mr. Holland's Opus </i>kind of like teacher-porn.<br /><br />Movies are not supposed to be real; they are supposed to be entertainment. Does anyone really watch <i>Lethal Weapon </i>in anticipation of seeing a realistic depiction of police work? Hell, no, because if <i>Lethal Weapon </i>truly reflected reality, we'd be sitting through Internal Affairs hearings and psychological examinations of Martin Riggs, both conducted to get this psycho-with-a-badge off the streets.<br /><br />Speaking of <i>Lethal Weapon</i>, when I was in college (the first time), me and a few buddies picked up a copy of the movie one weekend shortly after it came out on video. One of these guys was a pudgy, red-headed dork, nicknamed Blinky. <br /><br />Blinky was going for some sort of engineering degree, and I’m sure he now makes more in a year than I will in two lifetimes. He wasn’t exactly one of <i>my</i> buddies - I thought he was smarmy little jerk - but he was good friends with one of the other guys, so Blinky always seemed to be around. Anyway, halfway through the movie (and our first case of beer), when Mel Gibson informs Danny Glover that a recently-exploded hooker’s house was detonated by some “heavy shit” known as a mercury switch, Blinky recalled his own technical knowledge and piped in, “Mercury switches are nothing. We use those in my electronics class. They aren’t heavy shit. How stupid.” <br /><br />I shot back with, “Well, Blinky, the <i>average</i> person ain’t gonna know that, so shut the fuck up.” He simply beamed back with a superior-than-thou expression, like we were all stupid for enjoying the movie because he knew something about mercury switches we didn't. Besides, maybe to a cop and not some eggheaded engineer, mercury switches <em>are</em> heavy shit.<br /><br />We all know someone like that, who enjoys pointing out every inaccuracy as though every movie should be the cinematic equivalent of <i>60 Minutes</i>. I hate those people. That’s like watching a cartoon in a theater filled with kids and shouting, “Yeah, right...like mice can <i>talk</i>. They don‘t have vocal chords.” I don’t watch <i>Lethal Weapon </i>hoping for a chemistry lesson. I wanna see gunplay, car crashes, explosions, wisecracks and&nbsp;maybe a boob or two. <i>Lethal Weapon </i>had all that and not <i>once</i> did I give a damn whether or not a fucking electric switch was heavy shit. Nobody condemns <i>Star Wars </i>just because the Tie-Fighters scream through space, even though space is a vacuum and devoid of atmosphere, rendering sound impossible. <br /><br />Still, I'll bet a lot of cops still liked <em>Lethal Weapon</em>, maybe enjoying the fantasy depiction of their mundane jobs. For me, it is the same with <em>Mr. Holland's Opus</em>. I'm no Mr. Holland, but wouldn't it be cool if I <em>was</em>?<br /><br />In fact, my only beef&nbsp;with the film is&nbsp;the influence&nbsp;it has had over the years…not on movies, but on real-life educators. Sure, this one has undoubtedly inspired people to become teachers the same way <i>Top Gun </i>encouraged guys to join the Navy, but I think it’s also&nbsp;mostly responsible for turning a lot of&nbsp;teachers into pompous, narcissistic, self-righteous&nbsp;bores. Sit in any room filled with teachers - staff meeting, workshop, college class - and&nbsp;one will inevitably raise their hand to proudly share a Mr. Holland moment, when they&nbsp;enlighten you&nbsp;with some saintly thing they’ve done to change students’ lives. His or her face is beaming proudly while the rest of the teachers in the room bob their heads in approval, looking like a bunch of well-dressed pigeons but not really listening. Most are just waiting for this idiot to stop so they can use up more oxygen with their <i>own</i> Mr. Holland moment. <br /><br />Trust me, as much as I love teaching, there is nothing worse than being in a room full of teachers. Teachers love to hear themselves talk, love to convince everyone else how dedicated they are to their profession, love to ‘piggyback’ on someone else’s comment in order to spout more pretentious crap. And a lot of it <i>is</i> crap. Some people discuss their educational ideals in such detail that is soon becomes obvious there are not enough hours in the day for them to accomplish the things they claim. Of course, no teacher has ever had a student who could be most-accurately described as little bastard or dumbass. No, those kids are simply misunderstood, troubled or challenged. And of course, none of these teachers have <i>ever</i> failed to turn a <strike>little bastard’s </strike>troubled kid’s life around. <br /><br />Sit in a room with these people and you’ll walk away with the impression that all of them are 100% successful, culturally sensitive, empathetic and incapable of anger towards students. No, not all teachers are like this. In fact, individually, most aren't.&nbsp;But when some of them get together to try and one-up each other’s Mr. Holland moment, the needle on the bullshit meter climbs into the red pretty quickly.<br /><br />One might argue that <i>any </i>inspirational movie about an educator could cause this, not just <i>Mr. Holland’s Opus</i>. But the difference is Holland isn’t some uber-teacher who saves a school, challenges authority for the sake of the kids or turns a class full of homies into valedictorians in a single semester. Holland is just an ordinary teacher who learns to love his job over the course of 30 years, and touches some lives along the way. Even the self-serving teachers I’m forced to endure in meetings realize they are not Erin Gruwell or Jaime Escalante, but they can easily envision themselves as Mr. Holland. A lot of them probably think they already are.</span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/3tEsqiD9Img" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/03/daves-movie-guide-mr-hollands-opus-1995.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-80639108237369749112012-03-22T18:02:00.000-07:002012-03-22T18:02:52.205-07:00Dave's Movie Guide: The Plague Dogs (1982)<span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Epsv8YUTs9Y/T2vLbIvSjxI/AAAAAAAAAP4/yqWkyes1xC0/s1600/plague.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Epsv8YUTs9Y/T2vLbIvSjxI/AAAAAAAAAP4/yqWkyes1xC0/s1600/plague.jpg" /></a></div>Hands down, the most relentlessly depressing movie of all time is <i>The Plague Dogs</i>. Go ahead, offer <i>Schindler’s List</i>, <i>Sophie’s Choice, The Road,</i> <i>Seven</i> or anything directed by Abel Ferrera as rebuttal to my claim. I dare you. Because if you do, you have either not seen <i>The Plague Dogs</i> or you truly believe that animals are as godless as the giant marauding Graboids in <i>Tremors</i>. If you are one of the latter, I do not want to know you, but I’m more inclined to believe you are one of the former. Who doesn't love animals? After all, look how often we watch films where countless people die, yet if even a single animal is in peril, we think, "No, not the dog!" Well, <i>The Plague Dogs </i>is a movie where nearly <i>every</i> cruel, violent or horrifying event is inflicted on man's best friend. <br /><br />Aside from my wife, to whom I subjected this movie when I found it on the shelf of a now-extinct mom-and-pop video store, I’ve still never met anyone who had even <i>heard</i> of <i>The Plague Dogs</i>, even though it is based on a novel by Richard Adams, most-renowned for penning the bestselling classic, <i>Watership Down</i>. That book was later adapted for the screen by director Martin Rosen.<br /><br />I tried reading <i>Watership Down </i>as a kid, but couldn’t get through it, mainly because of author Richard Adams, who expected the reader to keep referring to a glossary at the end of the book to understand the terms used by his rabbit characters (I’m sorry, but any book which requires you to <i>educate</i> yourself before enjoying the story isn’t worth reading). But the tale itself was intriguing enough to spawn a pretty great - though simplified - animated movie in 1978. And this wasn’t your normal Disney cartoon fare. <i>Watership Down </i>is very British and very violent, the first cartoon I ever saw where blood is visually split and characters die onscreen, sometimes horribly. <br /><br />As&nbsp;a kid&nbsp;whose cinematic tastes had developed well-beyond G-rated Disney fare, but still loved cartoons, the idea of an ‘adult’ cartoon had a lot of appeal. Hence, I loved <i>Watership Down</i>, which is still considered by many to be one of the greatest non-Disney, traditionally-animated movies of all time. Today, as a teacher instructing seventh grade students in persuasive writing - when I require them to view and write a review of a film - I occasionally truck out my copy of <i>Watership Down </i>just to mess with their heads. Even in this age of gory Japanese manga and anime (or in the case of <i>Sailor Moon</i>, pedophile training ground), I still hear kids, some jaded by far-more graphic violence in movies like <i>Saw</i> (it staggers me any rational parent would let them watch those), blurt out, “Holy crap, that bunny rabbit just got killed!” <br /><br />Many of my students&nbsp;react to&nbsp;the violence. Some dig it, others are shocked.&nbsp;But&nbsp;one problem many students often have with <i>Watership Down </i>is, in the filmmakers’ strive from realism, it is difficult telling the rabbits characters apart, because they all look the same (a totally legitimate argument against this film). And absolutely none of them knew why a film<i> </i>with such a title had no actual ships in it. Neither did I for the longest time. I had to look it up (incidently, it is the name of the grassy hill the rabbits discover in their quest for a new home, a place which actually exists in England). But even though <i>Watership Down </i>is a dark film, it is ultimately a life-affirming tale of selflessness, bravery and faith. <br /><br />Not so with <i>The Plague Dogs</i>, which is easily the most nihilistic, brutal and bleak movie I have ever seen. Like <i>Watership Down</i>, it is animated, and the fact it was made by the same director was the main reason I picked it up at the video store. But aside from the style of animation and British voices, the similarities end there. Unlike the somewhat-anonymous rabbits in <em>Watership Down</em>, we immediately&nbsp;form an attachment&nbsp;to the animal characters in <em>The Plague Dogs</em>, making subsequent events in the film&nbsp;so much more obscene.<br /><br />The plot centers around two hapless pooches, Rowf and Snitter, trapped in a research facility which conducts cruel experiments on animals. Snitter is sort-of nuts, suffering the effects of experimental brain surgery. Rowf is repeatedly subjected to tests where researchers document how long he’ll struggle to survive by treading water before giving up and drowning, then they fish him out so they can repeat the experiment again the next day. This is all in the first <i>five minutes </i>of the film. It only gets worse from there. Rowf and Snitter manage to escape the facility, only to be relentlessly hunted down by the local community and the military, due to a falsified press release that the two dogs are carrying a lethal plague. <br /><br />Through heart-breaking flashbacks, the viewer learns Snitter was once a loyal pooch loved by his master. Later in the film, while the two dogs are on-the-run, Snitter comes across the lone sympathetic human character in the movie, who is hunting in the woods. With the hope of finding a new master, Snitter is excited and hopeful, only to have this initially-promising meeting end tragically, when the dog’s paw hooks the trigger of the man‘s rifle, resulting in the man getting his face blown off. Rowf, on the other hand, has no illusions and&nbsp;has never trusted&nbsp;humans, having never experienced bonding with a master. Along the way, the two dogs befriend Tod, a sly fox who ends up being killed while trying to help. During all this time, both dogs are becoming visibly thinner and bonier from lack of food, and are later forced to eat one of the very people hunting them in order to survive. <br /><br />At the end, surrounded by military guns and helicopters, Snitter and Rowf reach the coast. With no choice, they try to escape to the ocean and swim to what Snitter mistakenly thinks is an island paradise, when in reality, it is just the setting sun. The film ends with the exhausted dogs, long past the point of no return, about to drown, yet still believing they’re going to find safety.<br /><br />That’s it. And remember, this movie is a cartoon, and even though it is rated PG-13, I found it in the <em>kids’</em> section of the aforementioned video store. What makes the movie even more of an ordeal is that the two main characters aren’t singing Disney dogs with sparky personalities reflective of the celebrities who voice them. They behave, think and speak the way we imagine <i>real</i> dogs would, unable to comprehend why all this is happening, yet remaining hopelessly optimistic that there is a human out there somewhere who will love them. This makes their ultimate fate as&nbsp;hard to watch&nbsp;as movies get.<br /><br /><i>The Plague Dogs </i>is extremely well made; the animation and voice characterizations are as good as, if not better than, <i>Watership Down</i>. But it is also so dark, disturbing, relentlessly oppressive and so&nbsp;contemptuous of humankind that it makes <i>Watership Down </i>look like <i>The Emperor’s New Groove</i> (if you consider yourself a ‘dog person’ it will fuck you up for life). And this tone is set so early that the viewer is pretty damn certain within a few minutes that this is one movie where things are going to end badly. I have never seen a movie where more craft and care was taken in making sure its audience feels like total shit afterwards.<br /><br />Yet, whenever you come across various critic or fan lists of the most disturbing movies of all time, <i>The Plague Dogs </i>is almost never included. Is it because the film is animated, the atrocities presented are inflicted on dogs, or that the movie simply hasn’t been widely seen? Whatever the case, the film is as painful to sit through as <i>Schindler’s List</i>, and although I admire it, I don’t think I could ever sit through it again, especially now that I own a dog.</span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/bqKQQcbn_r8" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/03/daves-movie-guide-plague-dogs-1982.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-11049689201535941402012-03-22T17:08:00.001-07:002012-03-26T13:33:01.881-07:00Dave's Movie Guide: American Pop (1981)<span lang="EN"></span><br /><span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sKui10aGtSY/T2u7nfzD1CI/AAAAAAAAAPw/q4Kbkd6FlcE/s1600/american.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sKui10aGtSY/T2u7nfzD1CI/AAAAAAAAAPw/q4Kbkd6FlcE/s1600/american.jpg" /></a></div>I have bad memories of this one. <i>Really </i>bad. <br /><br />I spent my teenage years growing up in a neighborhood development called Alderhill (don’t ask me what the hell that means). My parents had a house built for them there, a really hoity-toity block where the builders constructed homes based on the buyer’s specifications. We moved into our house when I was 13, and only about half of the neighborhood homes had been completed, and there were numerous others in various phases of construction. A kid I vaguely knew from school, Clay Walker, was already living there with his parents, and because of our proximity to each other, he soon became my best friend. <br /><br />Clay was (and still is) a great guy, with an off-kilter sense of humor and sharp wit which often came to the forefront when he’d drop obscure pop-culture references into conversations (mostly music or movie-based). He also did some crazy stuff (which I often encouraged), such as the day he <i>decided</i> he’d it would be cool to be a pyromaniac. So off he went to achieve this new goal, filling balloons with propane from his dad’s garage before lighting them up. The instant result was a brief-but-huge ball of flame. Then one day he had the brilliant idea of tying together a <i>dozen</i> propane-filled balloons and igniting them in his back yard. He ended up blowing his eyebrows off, and soon after that he smartly decided being a pyromaniac wasn’t such a great idea. <br /><br />Clay wasn’t <i>really</i> crazy or anything. A lot of what he did was deliberate, for the purpose of amusing his friends (much like the guys on <i>Jackass</i> years later, only they actually got <i>paid</i> to put themselves in harm’s way). He wasn’t stupid, either, even though he kind-of had that reputation because he had to repeat the eighth grade. Quite the contrary; the guy was smart as hell and got consistently better grades than I did in high school. With hindsight, I think a lot of the crazy stuff he did came from a desire to fit-in with the crowd we considered cool at the time. <br /><br />And Clay never had to beat his parents to the mailbox to intercept report cards, like I did. This was back when grades were sent home on mimeographed sheets, and I discovered it was possible to deftly incorporate the clever use of an eraser and blue pencil to change a D into a B. I even purchased the supplies required to alter my grades into something my parents would deem acceptable. The ruse worked a few times, but I got cocky once, erasing an F so hard that I tore through the paper. Considering this was during a time I got grounded for Cs, I thought my life was over. When I told Clay of my dilemma, he just laughed, and taunted me with what seemed like dozens of phone calls where he cackled, “You screwed it! You screwed it!” This didn’t help; my world was coming to an end, and my best friend thought the whole thing was funny. Of course, 30 years later, I think it’s hilarious now. What’s doubly hilarious is, after several weeks of no report cards showing up in the mail, my parents finally decided to search my room. They found the incriminating evidence under my mattress. They were so upset about my grades (and my efforts to conceal them) that they weren't even the smallest-bit fazed at the tattered Penthouse magazine I also had stashed there. <br /><br />Me and Clay did a lot of pretty dumb stuff together, and some of it was probably bad enough to land us in juvie if we were caught. <br /><br />Actually, we <i>were</i> caught one time. Me, Clay and another kid named Brian all told our parents we were spending the night at each other’s house, just so we could drive around all night and raise some hell. The first activity of the evening had us going to the 82<sup>nd</sup> Street Drive-In and getting loaded on vodka Brian stole from his parents. To save some cash, I stashed away in the trunk of the car before going in. By the way, if you’ve never ridden in the trunk of a car, trust me, it’s not fun. <br /><br />The theater was showing a double-bill, <i>American Pop </i>and <i>Tommy</i>, the latter being a musical relic from 1975 based on an album by The Who. <i>Tommy</i> played first; I remember wanting to see it when I was younger, mainly because I was an Elton John fan and loved his version of “Pinball Wizard.” It turned out I didn’t miss much. I was never a huge fan of The Who’s music to begin with, and even though the movie was loaded with stars, including Jack Nicholson, Oliver Reed, Elton John (who can’t act) and Tina Turner (who can), the only part I liked was seeing Ann-Margaret writhing around in baked beans. I was always somewhat infatuated with Ann-Margaret, and probably would have enjoyed baked beans more at the time if I knew <i>she</i> was waiting for me underneath them. Another strike against the movie is that there is no dialogue. The story is all told in song, which I’m not necessarily against, but I personally blame <i>Tommy</i> for probably inspiring director Alan Parker and Roger Waters for trying the same thing years later with <i>Pink Floyd The Wall</i> (my vote for the most boring musical of all time, even <i>with</i> the aid of narcotics).<br /><br />Still, <i>Tommy</i> was better than <i>American Pop</i>, an animated movie directed by Ralph Bakshi, who's been mistaken for a genius on more than one occasion. This was the guy who made the first X-rated cartoon (<i>Fritz the Cat</i>) and was the first to try adapting <i>The Lord of the Rings </i>for the big screen. He also decided to use his dubious animation skills (much of which consisted of Rotoscoping, a crappy-and-cheap technique which involves tracing over live-action footage) to chronicle the history of popular music in <i>American Pop</i>. According to the genius of Bakshi, the evolution of modern pop culminates in a drug-dealing James Dean look-a-like lipsyncing a Bob Segar song <i>(Bob Segar is the culmination of popular American music???). </i>Anyway, even though well-snockered by this time, the three of us pretty-much agreed the movie was phenomenally slow, crudely animated and boring, even back in 1982. Today, it looks downright archiac. <br /><br />Being a big music fan, I was willing to actually give the movie another chance when it played on cable years later. After all, lots of movies are better the second time. But I wasn’t able to sit through it again. Too many painful memories. Not of the movie itself (it’s been deservedly forgotten by most people), but how I associate seeing it with what me, Clay and Brian did later that night.<br /><br />Have you ever done something really stupid when you were younger and, upon thinking about it years later, you shutter at how dangerous your actions really were, and how much worse things could have turned out if luck wasn’t on your side? I have a lot of memories like that, such as when me and Clay once snuck out of our houses in the middle of the night and got the bright idea to try and climb a 300-foot radio tower. Even though this genius idea was initially mine, I got increasingly cold feet as we approached the tower, and it was only with Clay’s encouragement that we kept going. He even volunteered to climb first, which turned out to be a good thing for me, because Clay only got about ten feet up before he was electrocuted and fell back to the ground. He was scared, dazed and sported a nasty burn on his arm, but other than that, he was okay. Thank God because, besides losing my best friend, I wouldn’t have been able to effectively explain his char-broiled demise to his grieving parents. I have to admit, though, his continued terrified ranting on the long walk home afterwards, when he briefly entertained the notion that he really <i>did</i> die and was now in Hell (yes, we were both drunk), is pretty chuckle-worthy. <br /><br />But not even a year later, on that fateful night when we saw <i>American Pop</i>, I discovered that there was one thing scarier than a near-death experience…getting busted. <br /><br />It was around three-in-the-morning, long after leaving the drive-in, and the three of us&nbsp;soon realized&nbsp;the idea of&nbsp;staying out all night wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. We were tired and bored, but couldn’t go home; the lies we told our parents excluded that option. We tried to get some shut-eye in the car, but have you ever really tried getting a good night’s <i>sleep </i>in in one? Not gonna happen.<br /><br />That’s when I had the bright idea to go egg a house. But not just any house; the house of a kid we all hated. The kid in-question, Dan Sweet, had never done anything to us personally, but he was ‘different’ from us, and somewhat lacking in social skills, so of course we thought he was an utter dork deserving of punishment. <br /><br />No, I’m not proud of that, and Dan, if you’re reading this, sorry man. I hope life has treated you better than we ever&nbsp;did.<br /><br />So after stopping by a nearby 7-Eleven to grab some ammo (this was back in the day when apparently there was nothing suspicious about three bloodshot-eyed teenagers buying a carton of eggs in the middle of the night), we headed to the Sweet residence. I knew where he lived because I walked past his house every morning on the way to school.<br /><br />Upon spotting the house, which was totally dark save for a porch light, we gathered our eggs and climbed out of the car. After we scanned the surrounding homes to make sure no one happened to be peering out their windows, we let the eggs fly, splattering the roof, the front door and one of the bedroom windows. Laughing hysterically, we jumped back into the car and high-tailed it out of there. <br /><br />It was maybe twenty minutes later, Brian once again driving around with nowhere to go, that Clay spotted flashing red and blue in the distance behind us.<br /><br />“Shit!” he cried. “Is that a cop?”<br /><br />I turned around. The lights must have been a quarter-mile back, but they were coming fast. “He ain’t after us,” I said confidently, probably because I was still drunk.<br /><br />“Oh, man,” Brian said, unsure of what to do. “Should we pull over?”<br /><br />“No!” I snapped back. “He’s probably going on another call.”<br /><br />“What if I was speeding?” Panic spread across Brian’s face. “Oh, shit, we got booze and eggs in the car!”<br /><br />I whipped around to Clay, who was sitting in wide-eyed panic in the back seat. “Stash the bottle and the eggs!” Then I turned to Brian. “Turn off on the next street. Maybe they’ll just keep going.”<br /><br />He never got that chance, because the cops <i>were indeed</i> after us. Still, I refused to believe it was because of the assault on Dan’s house. After all, we’d never been caught before. We were too smart, right? <br /><br />Brian pulled over. The flashing police lights were blinding in the rearview mirrors. Two cops ordered us from the car. We complied, and it wasn’t until we were being frisked that reality instantly sobered me up. <br /><br />The cops tossed the car, and almost immediately found the almost-empty vodka bottle and egg carton.<br /><br />“I swear to God, I had no idea those were in there!” I remember claiming, even though both Brian and Clay had already manned-up and admitted what we did. Not much of a friend, was I? Turning chickenshit to try and save my own ass. <br /><br />One of the cops, sporting a bushy porn-star mustache and coffee breath, got in my face and sneered, “I don’t think I like this kid. He’s a fuckin’ liar.” <br /><br />I nearly pissed myself.<br /><br />“Tell you what…either we call your parents or haul your sorry ass to jail.” He leered at me with a shit-eating grin I’ll never forget. <br /><br />Jail or parents. What, no third option, like death? I would have preferred that one over calling my parents. After all, in my mother’s eyes, I was still some sort of golden boy, incapable of such behavior. <br /><br />One of the most vivid memories from my childhood is seeing my parents driving up in their Volkswagen to pick me up by the roadside where cops stopped us. Dad always had a short fuse. No, he never beat me or anything, and was an awesome father, but he was also easily angered back then (which suddenly went away forever after he later retired from his career in public education…fancy that). But on this night, he had no expression at all as he climbed from the car to collect his delinquent son. His face was the scariest thing of all. No emotion, no rage, nothing. That’s when I knew I really screwed up. I triggered something in him <i>beyond </i>anger. I didn’t simply piss him off. I truly disappointed him, which was worse. <br /><br />Mom was in tears, of course, as I knew she would me. She was also still living in total denial, because she couldn’t bring herself to believe her son could be involved in such an activity without being coerced by his friends. I <i>must</i> have given in to peer pressure. For a short time afterwards, she forbade to hang around Clay, even though egging the house was actually my idea. In fact, a lot of the deviant behavior we engaged in was my idea.<br /><br />I got grounded for about 800 years, which I deserved. I also remember being pissed that Clay got off scot-free; his parents just chalked it up to boys being boys. Where could <i>I</i> buy parents like that? It could have been worse, though. I could have gone to jail, and thank God the Sweets chose not to press charges. Still, this incident is the only time in my life where I was nailed by police and treated like a criminal. <br /><br />I don’t know whatever became of Brian - he was more Clay’s friend than mine - but Clay turned out okay, having developed some common sense long before I chose to. I still talk to him on the phone from time to time, and he’s married with a good job. <br /><br />To this day, even if&nbsp;<i>American Pop </i>was the greatest animated achievements of all time (which it isn't), there’s no way I could watch it today without reliving that night in excruciating detail. Getting busted for egging a house may not rank anyone&nbsp;in the company&nbsp;of Dillinger, but when you are 17, it’s like your world is coming to an end. <br /><br /></span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/BSylOMvLthc" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/03/daves-movie-guide-american-pop-1981.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-33270570748631920932012-03-19T16:57:00.000-07:002012-03-19T16:57:20.991-07:00Dave's Movie Guide: Jaws<span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--TjMmJ3GaiA/T2fFXIisDoI/AAAAAAAAAPo/7HMoJM34Ei8/s1600/jaws.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--TjMmJ3GaiA/T2fFXIisDoI/AAAAAAAAAPo/7HMoJM34Ei8/s1600/jaws.jpg" /></a></div>If you weren’t around in the summer of 1975, it’s hard to imagine the impact this movie had on everybody. Not just audiences, but society in general, including my mother (who didn’t actually sit down to finally watch it with me for a couple of decades). The first true summer blockbuster (yes, kids, even before <i>Transformers</i>), <i>Jaws</i> scared the bejeezus out of damn near everybody, so much so that many won’t even venture into the ocean to this day (including yours truly). I was 11 when it came out, and based on what my lucky friends who saw it had said, <i>Jaws</i> was numero uno on my gotta-see list.<br /><br />My mom, however, shot down my plans pretty swiftly. “You are not going to see that. My friend at work told me a dog gets eaten, and a dead man is floating in the water with no eyes.”<br /><br />This was still a few years before questioning her authority was an option. So, as an already obsessive movie geek, I was heartbroken. There it was, the mother of all movies, the cinematic Holy Grail, playing at the Southgate theater only five miles away, rendered forbidden fruit by my mother. Sure, I knew the whole story of the movie already, enthusiastically told to me by friends whose parents had no objections to letting <i>them</i> see it. But I wanted to see it myself. With <i>Jaws</i> rendered off limits, it became the <i>only</i> movie I wanted to see. And in ensuing months, I would occasionally ask Mom again, hoping she’d change her mind, but was always met with a stern no. She’d offer pretty-much the same reason every time: “That’s not the kind of movie a kid should see.” <br /><br />On rare occasions when I felt brave, I’d counter with, “But it’s rated PG. You’ve let me see PG movies before, like <i>Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid</i>.”<br /><br />“Butch Cassidy never devoured the Sundance Kid,” she said, probably proud of her response. On a side note, having read numerous biographies over the years, many of which claimed Newman was secretly bisexual, there is the speculation that maybe Butch once <i>did </i>devour the Sundance Kid, so to speak. Anyway, Mom would always add, “<i>Jaws</i> is a horror movie, and you’re not going to see a horror movie about a fish that eats people. It‘ll give you nightmares.”<br /><br />It was at this time I’d usually sulk back to my room, not understanding her reasoning. Even though I’d watched lots of horror movies before, for some reason she had a problem with <i>Jaws</i>. And with my limited debating skills, I was unable to convey how much it meant to me to actually <i>see</i> a fish eat people.<br /><br />It helps at this point to know a little about my mom. She’s a wonderful person, and I know she has always looked out for me, feeling the need that most good parents do of keeping their kids protected from things in the world which could harm them. Yeah, as I got older, I sometimes felt like she was a bit overprotective, and I was often bewildered at the pieces of pop culture she decided I wasn’t ready for. I bought an Alice Cooper record once, and was listening to it one evening when she suddenly popped into my room, right when Alice was singing about keeping a dead woman in a refrigerator. Grabbing the lyrics sheet, Mom was aghast, and instantly forbade me from buying any more Alice Cooper records. Funny thing is, I was just a kid and didn't care about the words, and had no idea what the offending song (“Cold Ethyl,” by the way) was actually about. I just thought it sounded cool. The only reason I discovered the subject of the song was because <i>she</i> pointed it out. This new knowledge actually made the song even cooler.<br /><br />Okay, as a parent myself, I cannow &nbsp;understand her concern about what her son was listening to. And even though I thought Mom was being a bit overzealous, it was her right as a parent to express her concerns.<br /><br />However, when I later got into a band called Emerson, Lake &amp; Palmer, she and my dad eventually forbade me from buying their records simply because they personally hated the music. It had <i>nothing</i> to do with what they sang about. But again, since they were paying the bills and I was living under their roof, doing so was still their right (although, somewhat amusingly, as my musical tastes eventually turned to heavy metal, I distinctly remember, during a shopping trip when I planned on snapping up the latest Judas Priest album, Mom suggested, “Why don’t you buy an Emerson, Lake &amp; Palmer record? You used to love them.”)<br /><br />What Mom declared forbidden became increasingly random. She decided I couldn’t go see <i>Phantasm</i> because of the tagline, “If this one doesn’t scare you, you’re already dead,” yet she had no problem dropping me and two friends off to catch <i>Dawn of the Dead</i>, a movie so gory that it was released unrated, at a seedy little theater whose employees never checked IDs. If you’ve ever seen both of these films, you’d know that you must be already dead, because <i>Phantasm</i> isn’t all that scary, but <i>Dawn of the Dead </i>is one of the most brutal and vicious movies ever made. Even more perplexing was her decision to forbid me from seeing <i>The Gauntlet</i>, a fairly minor (and stupid) movie in the Clint Eastwood canon, but simply something I had expressed an interest in watching. Yeah, that movie was rated R, but I’d seen rated R movies before, including <i>Blazing Saddles</i>, which <i>they</i> took me to see (if you’ve never seen <i>Blazing Saddles</i>, let me just tell you that the liberal use of the ‘N-word’ would probably shock modern audiences). Mom even had no problem with dropping me off at the Southgate to allow me to engage in the illegal act of sneaking from theater to theater to watch all the movies playing at this four auditorium theater for the price of one ticket. During this time I remember seeing such gory movies as <i>Death Race 2000</i>, where drivers compete in a cross-country race and earn bonus points for running over pedestrians. Still, for some unfathomable reason, while sneaking into movies without paying was okay, <i>The Gauntlet </i>was forbidden. And of course, being more rebellious at the age of 14, I went and saw it anyway, telling Mom I was gonna see something else. But, because I still respected Mom’s law, I later informed her of my crime, and was promptly grounded.<br /><br />Anyway, back to <i>Jaws</i>. In November, on my 12th birthday, for reasons I still cannot fathom, Mom suddenly decided it was okay for me to invite a couple of friends to go see <i>Jaws</i>. By this time, the film had been out for six months. Everyone else had already seen it, including the friends I invited, but it didn’t matter. After months of hype, months of hearing from friends how awesome and scary it was, I finally got to see this pop culture phenomenon for myself.<br /><br /><i>Jaws</i> takes place in the fictional coastal town of Amity (in real life, Martha’s Vineyard), where a 25-foot great white shark starts attacking swimmers. In order to save this vacation town from financial ruin, sheriff Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), shark expert Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and loony charter boat captain Quint (Robert Shaw) set out on a rickety fishing boat to kill the shark. That’s the movie in a nutshell, and while it doesn’t sound like much on paper, how the story is so masterfully told that it rightfully made a superstar out of young director Steven Spielberg. We don’t even <i>see</i> the shark until about halfway through, which made it even scarier (it has been well-documented that the decision not to show the animal too much stemmed from the fact the mechanical shark built for the film broke down pretty often). <br /><br />The final act (onboard the fishing boat) is still one of the most relentless and entertaining third acts ever made. And who really cares if you can’t actually blow up a three ton shark by shooting the scuba tank lodged in its mouth? It’s no more ridiculous than Jeff Goldblum destroying an entire alien civilization in <i>Independence Day </i>by firing up his laptop, and is sure as hell a better ending than the one offered by original <i>Jaws</i> author Peter Benchley, where the shark simply rolls over and dies. By the way, if you never read the original novel, don’t bother. It sucks.<br /><br />For me, <i>Jaws</i> is one of the few movies that lived up to all the hype…and then some. We’ve all gotten amped-up to see uber-promoted blockbusters only to walk out of the theater thinking, “So what?” But <i>Jaws</i> was everything I hoped it would be: scary, funny, surprising. It was not the shocking gore-fest Mom feared - only five people are actually killed - and the poor little pooch she was so worried about doesn‘t die onscreen…in fact, it’s only implied that he dies. There <i>is</i> that jolting scene of one victim’s head popping at the screen with an eye missing, which scared me so bad my popcorn went flying, but <i>Jaws</i> was always more than just a “gotcha” horror movie. Leaving the theater, I felt like I saw just something special, more than just another flick my parents dropped me off to see while they went shopping. In ensuing years, not too many movies gave me that same rush. <i>Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark </i>and <i>Escape from New York </i>(I’ll explain that last one later) immediately come-to-mind, and the last movie to hit me with the impact of <i>Jaws</i> was <i>Pulp Fiction</i>.<br />&nbsp; <br />But, just like my mom feared, the movie did give me nightmares. After coming home from the movie on my 12<sup>th</sup> birthday, some time during the night I crept into my parents’ room and crawled into bed with them. Man, that guy with his eyeball missing really did freak me out.<br /><br />By the way...it is still my favorite movie.</span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/9SiyfUtfKiQ" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/03/daves-movie-guide-jaws.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-70398282266505550982012-03-18T18:24:00.001-07:002012-03-19T16:16:03.610-07:00Dave's Movie Guide: The Shining<span lang="EN"></span><br /><span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-P_Bq9DX4zXk/T2aKC6DsOzI/AAAAAAAAAPg/_Ivd9yAB4Fg/s1600/shining.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-P_Bq9DX4zXk/T2aKC6DsOzI/AAAAAAAAAPg/_Ivd9yAB4Fg/s1600/shining.jpg" /></a></div>I’m pretty certain that <i>The Shining </i>is the first film I ever saw where I had already read the book upon which it was based. That being said, it was also my first introduction to the enormous liberties filmmakers take when adapting novels to the big screen. Sure, I’d read <i>Jaws, Airport </i>and <i>The Poseidon Adventure, </i>but only after I'd seen the movies, which is not the same thing<i>, </i>mainly because I had already been given someone else's picture of those events. <br /><br />You don't have a predetermined picture if you read the book first,&nbsp;so you are now counting on filmmakers to fulfill your expectations, even though they have no idea how you personally pictured events in the book. This is, of course, fuel for the time-honored the cliche&nbsp;we've all quipped at one time or another:&nbsp;"the book was so much better than the movie". Cliche as it is, however, such an axiom is&nbsp;usually true, mainly because a filmmaker is asked to distil a book, which takes the average person two-to-three days to read, into a two-hour film. They're bound to leave out things fans of the book will be up-in-arms about. Or worse yet...make wholesale changes to the story itself.<br /><br />And the first time I experienced this feeling was with <i>The Shining</i>.<br /><br />Ever since ninth grade, I’ve been a huge Stephen King fan. His first book I read was <i>The Stand</i>, an apocalyptic, 800-page epic that I managed to finish in a single day, partially because I was grounded over the weekend, but also because I simply couldn’t put it down. Of all of King’s eight billion novels, it remains my favorite, and I’m still waiting for a truly great movie adaptation. The 1994 miniseries was pretty faithful to the book, but in my humble opinion, it was kind of cheap and watered down. And I still can’t take Molly Ringwald seriously. I really wish someone in Hollywood would have the balls to do for <i>The Stand </i>what Peter Jackson did with <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>...a big-ass story which can only be told over the course of three movies.<br /><br />But by the time I read King's <i>The Shining</i>, I still wasn’t really selecting books based on who wrote them, even though <i>The Stand </i>was uber-awesome. The only reason I chose to read <i>The Shining </i>was because, during my parents’ annual ritual of sending me and my sister off to my grandma’s house for a week every summer, that book happened to be on her shelf. Grandma was a voracious reader, and belonged to God-knows how many book clubs, which sent her God-knows how many hardcover books every month. She read so many books that I remember a few occasions when she bought a book, only to discover a few pages in that she’d read it before. Hence, her house was literally crammed with so many freaking books that she couldn’t possibly have gotten to them all before she passed away years later. I only wish she could have stuck around long enough to see my own first book published. Even though it wasn’t in a genre that interested her, I think she would have been proud.<br /><br />Anyway, Grandma lived in Prosser, Washington, a tiny town where the cows outnumber the human population. This meant I spent a lot of those summer weeks bored out of my freaking mind. But one day, when it was way too hot to go outside and Grandma had her nose buried in another novel, I checked out her shelves. The only book that looked even a little bit interesting was <i>The Shining</i>, which I’d at least <i>heard</i> of. My grandma read lots of genres, though, but never horror. The only reason she had a copy of <i>The Shining</i> was the book club sent it automatically, a reward for the countless Arthur Hailey and Harold Robbins stuff she had already devoured. <br /><br />And the damn thing scared the shit out of me. <i>The Stand </i>may be&nbsp;King's best book, but to me, <i>The Shining </i>was his most scariest. To this day, it<i> </i>is the only novel which made me afraid to turn out the lights at night. It also confirmed in my mind that Stephen King was the greatest writer ever. <br /><br />So imagine the thrill I felt when I later learned it was going to be a movie. I just <i>knew </i>it was destined to be the scariest thing ever made, even scarier than <i>The Exorcist</i>. I couldn’t wait. The movie was especially a big deal in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, because the exterior scenes of the Overlook Hotel were shot at Timberline Lodge, a ski resort only an hour’s drive away.<br /><br />At that time, even though my obsession with movies was approaching geek level, I didn’t know Stanley Kubrick from the Stanley Cup. The only movie of his I’d seen at the time was <i>2001: A Space Odyssey </i>when it played on TV, and all I could think about before changing the channel after 20 minutes was, “What the&nbsp;hell do these angry monkeys have to do with space?” Of course, when I got older, I learned to appreciate him as a genius, but as a 15-year-old who’d seen <i>Star Wars</i> but hadn’t yet discovered weed (which, by the way, is still the best way to enjoy <i>2001</i>), I was monumentally disappointed that I wasted so much time watching primates beat each other to death with bones.<br /><br />Stanley Kubrick was an American director who lived in England, and made a movie once every 600 years or so. He chose his projects very carefully and, like Alfred Hitchcock, <i>he</i> was the true star of his movies. They were celebrated events whenever he eventually chose to make one, which wasn’t often; following <i>Dr. Strangelove </i>(my personal favorite) in 1964, Kubrick only made six more movies before he died in 1999. The guy was notorious for taking forever to set up individual shots, and requiring tons of takes for every one of them. It has been well-documented that, during the making of <i>The Shining</i>, he rendered Shelley Duvall to tears because of the sheer number of takes he made her endure for a single scene. Then again, Shelly Duvall looks like someone you could render to tears just by looking at her cross-eyed.<br /><br />Still, his films have a look and tone like no one else’s. They are epic and claustrophobic at the same time, slow-moving yet fascinating, beautiful to look at but sometimes (in the case of <i>A Clockwork Orange</i>) really, <i>really</i> disturbing. Kubrick tackled a lot of different genres, but his movies all somehow <i>felt</i> the same (which I’m certain was intentional). When you’re watching a Stanley Kubrick movie, you <i>know</i> you’re watching a Stanley Kubrick movie.<br /><br />Which is why he was totally the wrong guy to direct <i>The Shining</i>. Stephen King thought so, too, who famously equated <i>The Shining </i>with a beautiful car that had no engine.<br /><br />But I didn’t know all that at the time. All I knew was the scariest book I ever read was gonna be a movie, and I was gonna be first in line to get the bejeezus scared out me yet again. I only hoped I wouldn’t feel the need to crawl into my parents’ bed later, as I did&nbsp;after I first saw&nbsp;<i>Jaws</i>. At 16, that would be pretty weird.<br /><br />That didn't happen, because the movie was a total letdown. Not scary at all. It was slow, long and stripped of nearly all the supernatural elements of the story that made it so scary in the first place. I couldn’t believe how much the movie strayed from the book. Where were the hedge animals? Where was the backstory that explained the Overlook Hotel’s dark past? Where were the phantasms who contributed to Jack Torrance’s descent into madness, or maybe even took possession of him? Kubrick took out all that stuff and more, leaving just the title, the initial premise and the characters. <br /><br />All of the scariest parts of the novel were taken out! What we got was Jack Nicholson slowly going apeshit (which, admittedly, is pretty cool), with a few supernatural elements almost randomly crammed in towards the end. In the book, there is a recurring image of a guy in a dog costume is performing oral sex on another man, and King slowly reveals the importance of the scene, with relation to the hotel’s history, as the story progresses. In the movie, there’s only a single random shot of this, which makes absolutely no sense because the viewer is not given any previous explanation for its importance. It just becomes a WTF moment. As a movie fan, I’ve got no problem with filmmakers making changes or taking liberties with the source novel to create a better movie experience (thank God Spielberg did so when making <i>Jaws</i>). But come on, why would you suddenly include a single random shot of a dog blowing someone if you aren’t going to explain <i>why</i> it is there?<br /><br />Additionally, it’s one thing to make sweeping changes to an obscure novel, or one that wasn’t very good to begin with (like <i>Jaws</i>). But <i>The Shining </i>was already a huge, critically-praised, bestseller by the time Kubrick got his hooks into it. One would think anybody involved in adapting a story like this would want to remain as faithful to the source material as possible (like the <i>Harry Potter </i>movies) just to please fans. And I think if the movie was directed by someone with less clout than Kubrick, he or she would have done that very thing. Instead, Kubrick took an author’s story and used it as a springboard to make another <i>Stanley Kubrick film</i>, which is really its own little genre. <br /><br />He’s done this before. <i>Dr. Strangelove</i> was based on the dead-serious novel of nuclear brinkmanship, <i>Red Alert</i>, by Peter George. By the time Kubrick was done, <i>Dr. Strangelove</i> had become a vicious satire and is still generally regarded as one of the greatest comedies of all time. But almost nobody remembers George’s novel.<br /><br />Maybe that was Kubrick’s intention with <i>The Shining</i>, too. And maybe he succeeded, because his version is considered by countless viewers, critics and historians to be one of the greatest horror films ever made, most of whom probably never read the book. And even though I cried foul at the liberties Kubrick took with <i>The Shining</i>, I never actually read <i>Red Alert</i>, but think <i>Dr. Strangelove </i>is a great film. Maybe I'd think the same about <i>The Shining </i>if I hadn't read the book first, because Kubrick’s version of <i>The Shining </i>is indeed loaded with hypnotically astounding scenes which often have little or nothing to do with the original novel,&nbsp;especially the endless use of Steadicam tracking shots. Steadicam was a fairly new technology at the time,&nbsp;which allowed a cameraman to smoothly follow the action, no matter what the terrain. Kubrick utilizes the Steadicam like it's a new Christmas toy, so much so that these scenes dominate the viewer's attention. Yeah, it all looks really cool, but it is obvious Kubrick was far more in love with the setting in which he could play with his toys than the story, its characters or his actors.<br /><br />Regarding the latter, the acting is awful, with two exceptions.&nbsp;One is Jack Nicholson’s totally unhinged performance as Jack Torrence (pretty much the same thing he did when single-handedly saving Tim Burton’s version of <i>Batman </i>a few years later). But even then, that was Jack being Jack Nicholson, not Jack Torrence. Even the movie's most infamous line <i>("Heere's Johnny!") </i>was improvised by Nicholson, and not part of the original script. It’s pretty safe to say one-liners like this are the other main reason <i>The Shining </i>is held in such high regard, though I personally think Jack's lengthy conversion in the bathroom with the ghost of Delbert Grady is by-far the best scene in the movie.<br /><br />I’m also still pretty amazed at little Danny Lloyd’s performance as Jack's son; for a kid that age to hold his own against Nicholson…remarkable for a six-year-old kid. He still gets my vote for the greatest-ever performance by a child actor, mainly because he never seems like he is acting. In fact, once you get over Jack being Jack, Lloyd's might actually be the greatest performance in the whole film. The same can't be said for Shelley Duvall, as Jack's mousy wife, who truly sucks. Her performance in the early scenes border on amateurish, and as for her overwrought hysteria in later scenes, I still myself wishing Nicholson really <i>would</i> bash her brains “right the fuck in.” <br /><br />It wasn’t until years later, watching the film again, after developing an appreciation for Kubrick's craft, that I was able to detach myself of the source novel and at-least appreciate the movie for what it is…a great-looking piece of cinema that manages to feel epic and claustrophobic at the same time. Kubrick probably never meant for us to draw comparisons between the book and the film. I still don’t think it’s very scary, but it sure is fun watching Kubrick’s Steadicam chase little Danny around the hotel halls. <br /><br />I dunno, maybe the original story is one of those which is simply impossible to effectively adapt (there <i>is</i> a ton of internal dialogue in the book). King himself even&nbsp;attempted to adapt&nbsp;his own story years later as a TV miniseries and couldn’t pull it off (in fact,&nbsp;that one is&nbsp;downright boring). Maybe it’s true that a reader’s imagination creates scarier images than any filmmaker can possibly achieve. Maybe because of that, it is simply not possible to recreate the same terror onscreen that I felt when first reading the book. <br /><br />As a film, I still think <i>The Shining </i>is pretty overrated. It is far-more in love with style over substance, and I am still stunned by the number of highly-regarded critics who continue to rank it among the scariest movies ever. To those critics, who obviously have never read the original novel, I have to ask whether or not their assessment is swayed by their love of Kubrick as a director, Nicholson's scenery-chewing or its technical virtuosity.<br /><br />Is it creepy? Yes. Does it create a sense of dread in the viewer? Yes. Is it at least interesting enough to justify its 144 minute running time? Yes, but that's faint praise for a movie based on a book that once scared the living hell out of millions of readers. Although I must admit I like the movie for what it is (a deliberately-paced, hypnotic descent into madness), I can't help but think how truly scary this film <i>would</i> have been if it had simply stuck with the original story...you know, the one those who love the movie have obviously never read.</span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/YKMggnLu8Hg" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/03/daves-movie-guide-shining.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-14507947566737015952012-03-16T18:54:00.001-07:002012-03-16T19:20:11.788-07:00Dave's Movie Guide: The Blues Brothers<span lang="EN"></span><br /><span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8xpOV06Qgd8/T2PqoMg9DNI/AAAAAAAAAPY/OMVHmdhTtcw/s1600/blues.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8xpOV06Qgd8/T2PqoMg9DNI/AAAAAAAAAPY/OMVHmdhTtcw/s1600/blues.jpg" /></a></div><div align="CENTER"><br /></div>When I was a kid, I had this buddy named Matt Schuler, whose dad was the first in the neighborhood to buy a VCR (or VTR, as they were called back in the day), a mammoth box roughly the size of a Chevy Nova, which played Betamax tapes. I think his dad bought it primarily to record football and watch porn, but I was in awe because this giant machine was every movie lover’s dream...the ability to watch a <i>real movie </i>in the privacy of your own home, without waiting for it to come on HBO or for NBC to edit the shit out it two years after it showed in theaters. <br /><br />Back then, there wasn’t a Red Box on every corner. There weren't even any Blockbuster stores, so to rent movies, one had to drive halfway across town to small video store called Video East, the only place in the area that supported this new technology. It was a wonderful place, with a huge selection of over <i>100 movies </i>(not counting the pornos hidden behind some curtains in the back room). <br /><br />One of those early videos was 1980's <i>The Blues Brothers</i>. I had seen it before. <i>The Blues Brothers</i> was a already a milestone in my young life because it was the first movie I invited a girl to on an actual <em>date</em>, where I picked her up and paid for everything. Her name was Molly, a cute girl I was friends with in high school.&nbsp;We went&nbsp;to the Foster Road Drive-In to catch the flick. Of course, the Foster is not there today, long-ago replaced by an industrial park.<br /><br />Back then, taking a date to a drive-in mostly meant one thing, and it wasn’t to watch the movie. But because my movie-geekness still outweighed my teenage urges, we actually sat in my car together and <i>watched the movie</i>, an act probably not expected from a teenaged kid with a girl seated next to him.<br /><br />Hey, what can I say? Yeah, girls are awesome, but so are movies, especially when you have to pay for them with your meager allowance.<br /><br />Anyway, after the show was over, I drove her home, we kissed goodnight and that was it. We never went out again afterwards, even though the date was great (at least <em>I</em> thought so) and we remained friends. I'm not sure why I never asked her out again. Maybe it was because the <i>next</i> girl I asked out definitely <em>knew</em> the purpose of drive-in dating, and didn't give a damn what was on-screen. After about five minutes with her, I didn't give a damn, either.<br /><br />Anyway, a year or so after that first date with Molly, <i>The Blue Brothers </i>was one of the first-ever movies available to rent and take home. In case you haven't seen it, the film is a musical comedy based on a recurring sketch from <i>Saturday Night Live, </i>back when that show was still funny. John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd play Jake and Elwood Blues, two seedy musicians trying to save an orphanage from foreclosure by getting their band back together and doing a show. The thin plot is mostly an excuse to feature a lot of deadpan comedy, several musical numbers and, best of all, a shitload of car chases and vehicular mayhem. <br /><br />Not to let my inner sexist show,&nbsp;I'm a guy, and&nbsp;even though I now have an appreciation for many classic musicals, that's not the same as actually enjoying them. As much as I can honestly acknowledge the artistry and elegance of a film like <i>The King and I</i>, I really don't feel the urge to sit through it a second time. Yeah, I know it made Yul Brynner a star, but I grew up watching him blow away tourists in <i>Westworld</i>, blasting banditos in <i>The Magnificent Seven </i>and being all-around badass in <i>The Ten Commandments</i>. I've seen each of those movies at least ten times each. I've watched <em>The King and I</em> once. <br /><br />Hey, I'm a guy. That's how I'm wired. Hell, that's how <i>most </i>guys are wired. And as guys, we can't help-but-think how much more awesome <i>The Sound of Music </i>would have been if the Von Trapp family strapped on some Uzis and commenced&nbsp;cutting Nazis in half&nbsp;between musical numbers. <br /><br />But <i>The Blues Brothers</i>? That is, without a doubt, the first-ever musical truly made for guys. for those of you planning a retort, do <i>not</i> bring-up the 1969 musical-western, <i>Paint Your Wagon</i>, where we are subjected to the horror of Clint Eastwood's vocal abilities, as a rebuttal. That overblown cinema suppository was simply another corny old musical which happened to feature two woefully-miscast Hollywood tough guys (the other being Lee Marvin, who turned down the fucking <i>Wild Bunch </i>to do this). <br /><br />And don't bring up <i>Pink Floyd the Wall</i>, either. Yeah, guys of that era loved Pink Floyd, but <em>The Wall</em> isn't even a movie. It's a 95 minute music video, and&nbsp;only interesting after you've addled yourself with enough LSD to think that Bob Geldolf is a good actor. Besides, narcotic hallucination knows no gender.<br /><br />No, what makes <i>The Blues Brothers </i>the first (and perhaps only) truly guys' musical lies in the fact that it is mostly rambling, shapeless and often-nonsensical, a hodge-podge of everything endeared by guys with the exception of gratuitous nudity. It only has more actual plot than <em>The Road Warrior</em> (surely the simplest story of all time). Sure, there are several musical set-pieces, just as expertly choreographed as anything in <i>Singin' in the Rain</i>, but for the most part, they do not serve the&nbsp;story in any way whatsoever (despite how awesome the songs are, especially when Arethra Franklin shows up to belt out the best number in the film). They pop-up almost randomly, as do the car crashes, guns, flamethrower attacks, building bombings, shopping mall destructions, Nazis, Orange Whips&nbsp;and gratuitous cameos by various actors, musicians, models &amp; film directors. <br /><br />Anyway, back to Video East, which had a promotion going at the time Matt plucked it off the shelf for us...if you could accurately count the number of cars destroyed in the movie, you’d win 10 free rentals! That didn't seem like a big deal, so once we got back to his house and shotgunned a few brews, we watched it closely, trying to keep track of all the vehicular carnage. It was easy at first, but became increasingly difficult as the movie progressed, especially during the last thirty minutes, during which time we just gave up (if you've ever seen the film, you know why). The vehicular attrition in <i>The Blues Brothers </i>must be seen to be believed. To this day, I am convinced tallying the automobile carnage in <i>The Blues Brothers </i>is an impossible task to all but the most dedicated movie geek, even with the ability to freeze a frame. I'm sure by now the total number of wrecked cars is available on some fanboy website somewhere, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, back then, not even the proprietors of Video East knew the exact count. <br /><br />On a side note, am I the only one who thought Dan Ackroyd was the funniest character in the movie, not John Belushi?</span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/FQ6B0dG4kK4" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/03/daves-movie-guide-blues-brothers.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-55358820844578110882012-03-14T17:13:00.000-07:002012-03-14T17:13:45.855-07:00Dave's Movie Guide: The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2)<span lang="EN"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vwdKrGOhyF4/T2EwDk3zGKI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/oK0MuberVWI/s1600/road+warrior.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vwdKrGOhyF4/T2EwDk3zGKI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/oK0MuberVWI/s1600/road+warrior.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;">My jaw continues to drop every time I pull up to the gas pump, the price per gallon seeming to rise on a daily basis, right along with my blood pressure. It wasn’t that long ago five bucks got me through the week. Now, it gets me to and from work <em>once</em>. Oh sure, the price drops a few cents every now and then, just enough for everyone to think $3.60 for a gallon of gas is a real bargain. But, sure as the tide, it’ll spike again to $3.80, then $4.00...etc. </div><br />The funny thing is...none of this has really changed anyone’s driving habits, including my own. We all still putter to work in our gas-chugging SUVs, and salivate as auto manufacturers roll out all new versions of V-8, hemi-powered Mustangs &amp; Chargers. Face it...we’ll continue to fill our tanks no matter what the cost. When it comes to gasoline, we’re a nation of highway heroin addicts. And when the day comes when we can no longer afford it, we’ll steal it...hell, the number of “gas ‘n’ dash” crimes in this country has already risen dramatically. <br /><br />Maybe it’s just a matter of time before a screaming psycho, sporting a mohawk, assless leather pants &amp; spiked shoulder-pads, forces your car off the road, blows you away, then makes off with the liquid gold in your gas tank. All you smug tree-huggers, full of yourselves&nbsp;for shelling out tens-of-thousands for environment-friendly hybrids, will be singing a different tune when the gasoline-apocalypse comes and you’re taken down on the highway by crazy marauders hunting you down in their&nbsp;300-horsepower death machines. You'll be as helpless as a seal pup in the jaws of a Great White.<br /><br />I find myself thinking of <i>The Road Warrior </i>more and more every time I have to refinance my house to fill the gas tank. It’s also one of the first movies I ever saw that made the end of the world look like a lot of fun. Speeding down the road in a souped-up Barracuda, blowing people away, crashing cars...how cool would&nbsp;<em>that</em> be? <br /><br />Of course, that was 1981. Now that I’m well-past the age where I’d look good in leather pants, I have to resign myself to the fact I’d probably be one of the first poor bastards raped and killed for the gas in my car.<br /><br /><em>The Road Warrior</em> is a flick every self-respecting&nbsp;middle-aged male knows by-heart (right up there with <em>Monty Python &amp; the Holy Grail</em>,&nbsp;<em>A Fistful of Dollars</em>&nbsp;and <em>Apocalypse Now</em>). It’s also, of course, the definitive chase movie, an apocalyptic Road Runner cartoon peopled by a cast dressed like they’re ready to get their freak on at an S&amp;M nightclub (admit it...the movie is one of the gayest pieces of pop-culture to come along since Judas Priest strapped on leather &amp; studs). Oh yeah, there’s also Mel Gibson in the role that made him an international star (long before used up all of his audience goodwill by&nbsp;revealing himself as&nbsp;a drunken Nazi). As Max, the burnt-out, dog food-eating cop who roams the post-WWIII Australian desert in search of fuel, Gibson is every bit the scavenger as the leather-clad gay boys chasing him down the highway. He’s also an shrewd opportunist. After the same band of marauders lay siege upon a refinery defended by the last remnants of civilization, Max offers to help these helpless folks escape the desert to freedom, so long as they give Max all the fuel his car can hold. <br /><br />That’s one of the really cool things about Max; he’s only a hero by accident...all he wants is gasoline so he can keep speeding through the desert, and doesn’t really give a damn about the folks whose lives he’s saving. Hell, he even puts a kid (the little monkey-boy whose character&nbsp;looks like he was&nbsp;inspired by that Cha-Ka thing from&nbsp;<i>Land of the Lost</i>) in harm’s way by making him climb onto the hood of a speeding truck, just to retrieve a shotgun shell so Max can blow someone else away. YEAH!!! <br /><i></i><br /><i></i><em>The Road Warrior</em> has one of the simplest plots in movie history, making the original <i>Mad Max </i>look like <i>The Usual Suspects</i> in comparison. No complex characters, no symbolism...just cut-and-dry good versus evil, with Max in the middle like an apocalyptic <i>Shane</i>. There’s very little dialogue; I’ll bet most porno scripts contain more verbal banter. Of course, that didn't stop a lot of cinema snobs from hiding their thrill-for-the-kill by wrapping <em>The Road Warrior</em> with misguided symbolism. <br /><br />But who really cares about dialogue, plot or symbolism when you’re watching some of the greatest chase scenes ever shot? If you want to look for symbolism in a motorcyclist being crushed under a semi’s tires (in slow motion!), be my guest. While you’re explaining to your college roommate that a crushed biker represents the everyman ground up by the wheels of conformity, I’ll just crack open another brewski &amp; hit the skip-back button to watch the scene again at half-speed, just to see how real it still looks (by the way, it still does). You know, even 30 years later, I’m still wondering how director George Miller pulled some of these stunts off. <br /><br />While I may no longer think the post-apocalypse hell-hole depicted in <i>The Road Warrior </i>would be such a kick to experience in real life, maybe the movie can still serve has sort of a how-to guide for the future. Sure, I could trade in my pick-up for a gas-friendly hybrid, but the thought of leather-clad crazies attacking me on the highway while driving such a puny putz-wagon keeps me from doing so. I want my next car to blow the doors off of any vehicle whose driver thinks they could take me down on the highway. Sure, you may laugh at my paranoia. <i>The Road Warrior </i>is just a movie, right? Then again, <i>The Running Man </i>seemed ridiculous at one time, too. Now <i>that</i> movie looks downright prophetic with all the reality crap vomiting from our TVs. But I’ll save that tangent for another time.</span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/k68TTQup1zk" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com1http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/03/daves-movie-guide-road-warrior-mad-max.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-4826084029677443512012-02-15T15:33:00.000-08:002012-02-15T15:33:35.812-08:00Metallica - Masters of Attempted Career Suicide<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XXl_O6SUhUU/TzxAC4-aIsI/AAAAAAAAAPA/LVNXooCXhMg/s1600/lulu.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XXl_O6SUhUU/TzxAC4-aIsI/AAAAAAAAAPA/LVNXooCXhMg/s200/lulu.jpg" width="200" yda="true" /></a></div>I just listened to <em>Lulu</em>, the polarizing collaboration between alt-rock godfather Lou Reed and thrash-metal godfathers, Metallica. I’d already heard countless scathing reviews (professional and unprofessional), but as a lifelong Metallica fan, I still refrained any personal opinion until I heard the record for myself. After all, I <em>did</em> think <em>Load</em> was better than a lot of people. But just in case, I did wait until I could find a copy of <em>Lulu</em> at used music store.<br /><br /><br />I can safely say this is the worst record I’ve ever heard, by any major artist. The album really, <em>really</em> sucks, little more than Reed’s stupid, quasi-racist, spoken-word, pseudo-beat poetry spouted over monotonous and generic riffs provided by Metallica themselves. It almost sounds like the music and words were randomly slapped together, without regard to melody or rhythmic synchronicity. And the damn&nbsp;thing is <em>87 minutes long</em>. The sheer awfulness of this two-disc train wreck must be heard to be believed.<br /><br />I’ve also read numerous articles and blogs claiming this album is a massive creative blunder from which Metallica may never recover, along with countless expletive-loaded comments by idiot readers on Blabbermouth.net acting like <em>Lulu</em> is some sort of crime against humanity. But a lot of people fail to realize one important fact…this <em>isn’t</em> a Metallica album. Sure, it might be promoted as such, and some might even think this is a joke-attempt by both parties involved to see what the music-buying public is willing to swallow. But a Metallica album it is not, and every band member has gone to great lengths to inform fans of this (maybe because the band heard the album afterwards and realized how crappy it was). But that hasn’t prevented the usual onslaught of ‘Metallibashing,’ something of a national sport in the metal community for years. <br /><br />The six Lou Reed fans in the world are likely to come to the same conclusion in their assessment of Lulu. But they will simply shrug and say, ‘Well, that’s Lou Reed for you,’ like when he shoved <em>Metal Machine Music</em> down their throats. But for metal fans who hoped Metallica would follow-up <em>Death Magnetic</em> (their heaviest album in 20 years) with something similar, <em>Lulu</em> was a slap in the face.<br /><br />Which kind of surprises me, really. It isn’t as though <em>Lulu</em> was the first time Metallica has chosen to confound their fans (on and off record). They’ve been doing it for years, almost since the beginning. I know, because, as a fan,&nbsp;I've been there the whole time. I humbly offer these previous failed attempts at career suicide:<br /><br /><em>Ride the Lightning</em> - Their second album. Yes, it’s a classic. Yes, it provided the blueprint for <em>Master of Puppets</em>, widely considered their masterpiece. But back in 1984, even though they were unofficial leaders of the burgeoning thrash metal movement, Metallica were already beginning to distance themselves from the limitations of the genre. What did they do for album two? Well, there’s epic, proggy instrumental, a failed attempt at a Judas Priest-type of single and a mid-tempo, sing-along anthem (“For Whom the Bell Tolls”). Then there is “Fade to Black,” a ballad, of sorts (by thrash standards, anyway). But even though it is still heavier than anything Motley Crue was pumping out at the time, this was a huge risk for a band still struggling to make a living. Grass-roots thrash fans were already screaming “sell-out.” But the risk paid off, however; regardless of what one thinks of the song itself, “Fade to Black” is arguably the best-known track on the album.<br /><br /><em>…And Justice for All</em> - Their fourth album, the first after losing bassist Cliff Burton in a tour bus crash. Despite the tragedy, Metallica were still riding high on the momentum of <em>Master of Puppets</em>, and after replacing their fallen comrade with Flotsam &amp; Jetsam bassist Jason Newsted, fans expected a similarly heavy follow-up. If there was ever a time to play it safe and do <em>Master of Puppets 2</em>, this was it. Instead, Justice is an album of overly-complex progressive metal which would have made Emerson, Lake &amp; Palmer proud. In addition, the bass is almost absent from the final mix. The whole album sounds thin and shallow, with no bottom-end. There’s a long-standing story that the final mix was part of a hazing for their new bassist. If that’s the case, Metallica had a lot of balls putting their careers on the line just to put their newest member in his place, especially since they were already not the most prolific of bands (the interim between albums was growing, but more on that later). Despite the crappy mix, <em>…And Justice for All</em> became their biggest album to-date (currently the second-best selling album in their entire catalog), largely due to yet-another pseudo-ballad, “One.” It is also considered by Metallica die-hards to be their last great album.<br /><br /><em>Metallica</em> (The Black Album) - Their fifth album. By now, the band had already achieved multi-platinum success on their own terms. They had won a Grammy and continued to sell-out arenas worldwide with their uncompromising, epic-length music. But rather than follow it up with a collection of songs that would give Dream Theater carpel tunnel syndrome, they put out The Black Album…12 tracks of simple riffs and more introspective lyrics, all clocking in at less than seven minutes each, with not a single thrash tune to be found. This is also the first album in which guitarist/vocalist James Hetfield actually sings rather than shouts (at the behest of new producer Bob Rock). While the album polarized many of its longtime fans, its success gained them millions of new ones. It’s important to acknowledge the popularity (and relevance) of thrash metal was waning at the time, and only the ones willing to move beyond the built-in limitations of the genre would survive the sudden and swift death of 80s metal. By having such foresight, Metallica managed to create one of the biggest-selling records of all time, the kind you eventually get sick of hearing.<br /><br /><em>Load</em> and <em>Re-Load</em> - This is where ‘Metallibashing’ really became a national sport. Not just because of the music which, admittedly, was somewhat unimaginative, derivative and&nbsp;sometimes dull, but because this was when Metallica first appeared concerned about their public image: short, slicked-back hair, fashionable suits, a ‘modernized’ band logo, expressing fondness for obscure alt-rock artists. They appeared to forsake both their thrash metal roots and the long-time fans who got them to this point. The music itself tried too hard to appeal to the alternative crowd, and indeed, Metallica were invited to headline Lollapaloosa, the annual festival for alternative rock acts. Still, while each album sold in the millions, both <em>Load</em> &amp; <em>Re-Load</em> were widely considered to be creative low points. On the other hand, Metallica was now one of the biggest rock bands in the world, maybe second only to U2, and richer than God. <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TWvOjxoTbyg/TzxAPG-fY_I/AAAAAAAAAPI/CulG0fSezfo/s1600/metallica.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="140" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TWvOjxoTbyg/TzxAPG-fY_I/AAAAAAAAAPI/CulG0fSezfo/s200/metallica.jpg" width="200" yda="true" /></a></div><br />Napster - Metallica were commissioned to record a song (“I Disappear”) for inclusion on the soundtrack for <em>Mission: Impossible 2</em>. However, before they were finished, demo tracks of the song began appearing on the internet through a file-sharing site called Napster. Metallica (most-publicly, Lars Ulrich) cried foul, threatening to present a list of thousands of Napster users who illegally downloaded Metallica songs for free. Never mind the fact that “I Disappear” pretty-much blows, it was the catalyst for the controversy. Such a legal move by the band alienated a lot of fans, who countered with the claim that Metallica first built their own career through illegal tape trading. This controversy destroyed any so-called street-cred Metallica once had. The common response (probably made by those who regularly download music for free) was that Metallica were greedy money-mongers. They may have come across as wealthy snobs during this debacle, but look what’s happened since. File sharing and free downloading has all-but-destroyed the music business. Their so-called greediness is now sadly prophetic.&nbsp;Ironically, Metallica is one of the only rock acts who haven’t been affected by this. Their albums continue to sell in the millions, while most artists can no longer make a living on music sales alone.<br /><br /><em>St. Anger</em> - Truly, the first album in which many thought Metallica had truly gone insane. It totally sounds like crap…on <em>purpose</em>. The whole conceit behind this record was, in producer Bob Rock’s assertion, to make a quick &amp; dirty, garage-band type of album, only that band happens to be Metallica. Okay, not a bad idea for such a high and mighty band to strip things down and get back to its simpler roots. But <em>St. Anger</em> came <em>six years</em> after their last studio album, took <em>two years</em> to make and is <em>80 minutes long</em>, without a single Kirk Hammett guitar solo to be found. A few critics enjoyed it, most people hated it, but everyone still bought it. <br /><br /><em>Some Kind of Monster</em> - Originally meant to be a document of the making of <em>St. Anger</em>, this film instead show a band about to fall apart. Bassist Jason Newstead had quit, founders Ulrich and Hetfield are at each other’s throats, and poor Kirk Hammett (the only person in the film who generates any real sympathy from the audience) stands by helplessly. The band hires a shrink (who, by the end of the film, comes across as a leech) to help them sort through their problems. Even former member Dave Mustaine shows up at one point for an emotional confrontation with Ulrich (and was apparently pissed the scene showed up in the final cut). We also meet new bassist Robert Trujillo, whose hiring is the music equivalent of winning the lottery (even though being a bassist in Metallica has got to be the most thankless job in the world). He’s more or less treated like a new employee, while Hetfield and Ulrich often come across as obscenely wealthy, spoiled brats. Allowing themselves to be presented like this is a pretty brave-ass move on their part, and the film itself is long and difficult to watch at times, featuring very little actual music outside of a few <em>St. Anger</em> recording sessions (which won’t make you appreciate the album any more than you already do).<br /><br />Interim between new albums - In their 30-year career, Metallica has released only nine studio albums, making Pink Floyd look as prolific as 70’s-era Kiss. The shortest time span between albums was <em>Kill ‘Em All</em> and <em>Ride the Lightning</em> (their first two). They released four albums in the 80s, but in the 20 years since 1991’s <em>Metallica</em>, they have released only four more. The 5+ years wait between records is long time to test a listener’s patience, even in this day and age, and especially with the critical scrutiny fans have given each release. Yet Metallica have cleverly managed to remain in the limelight the entire time…a new single here-and-there, bloated two-disc sets of cover tunes, live performances with orchestras, ballyhooed package tours, warts-and-all documentaries, all of which made millions. And when the band does decide to create new music, no matter how good or bad, it’s an event. Even <em>St. Anger</em>, their ‘worst’ album (in terms of sales and critical opinion), shot to number one on the Billboard charts and sold more copies than the best selling albums by Slayer, Megadeth or Anthrax.<br /><br />Which brings us back to <em>Lulu</em>. As of this writing, it is the only product they’ve attached their name to that has truly bombed (and deservedly so). One must remember that Metallica aren’t just a heavy metal band. For most, fans or not, they are <em><strong>the</strong></em> heavy metal band, and there are millions who wished they simply create <em>Master of Muppets, Part 72</em>. Sure, <em>Lulu</em> is the worst thing Metallica has ever attached their name to, and will likely go down as one of the most ill-advised collaborations in music history. Yes, even worse than Ozzy’s duet with Miss Piggy. But do we really want Metallica to make the same record over and over again? Isn’t that what prematurely ended or damaged the careers of so many other thrash bands? Wouldn’t you agree that if Metallica hadn’t continued to change, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t be here for us to kick around today?<br /><br />Of the so-called ‘Big Four of Thrash’ (the others being Megadeth, Slayer &amp; Anthrax), Metallica’s recorded output is easily the spottiest and least consistent, yet they are bigger than the other three combined. Each album, good or bad, is treated like an event, partly because we just don’t know what we’re in for before we listen to it. That sheer unpredictability part of what makes it fun to be a Metallica fan. It’s fun to debate whether or not <em>Death Magnetic</em> is worthy of comparison to <em>Master of Puppets</em>; it’s fun for metal purists to proclaim their utter contempt of the Black Album or <em>Load</em>; it’s fun to boast that you were a true fan from the beginning but hate everything Metallica has done since <em>…And Justice for All</em> (even if some of you might be full of shit); it’s fun to claim Lars Ulrich is a shitty drummer (mostly by people who heard it from someone else; I always thought he was okay); and it’s fun to listen to an album like <em>Lulu</em> and wonder, “what the hell were those guys thinking?” <br /><br />So, no…<em>Lulu</em> will not kill Metallica’s career. It probably won’t even damage it. In fact, Lulu still got more press (albeit <em>bad</em> press) than any of the recent releases by Metallica’s ’Big Four’ contemporaries. As the old adage goes, bad press is better than none at all. That’s not to say Metallica isn’t just one or two shitty albums away from successfully committing career suicide, but <em>Lulu</em> isn’t one of them; they were smart enough to put Lou Reed’s name first on the cover and repeatedly claim they were just the man’s back-up band. Lulu will go down in history as just a self-indulgent side project, and that’s all. <br /><br />Besides, Metallica seem to know just how far to approach the career suicide cliff without actually jumping. They knew enough to follow up <em>St. Anger</em> with their fastest, loudest, most solo-heavy album in years. They also knew enough to quickly release an EP of unreleased songs (<em>Beyond Magnetic</em>) almost immediately after <em>Lulu</em> tanked. Maybe the release of <em>Lulu</em> is just what old-school Metallica fans needed…something to hate that will make the band’s next album something they can love.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/RPrRvcXz7_A" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/02/metallica-masters-of-attempted-career.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3131371804971682300.post-32905218189442460112012-01-26T10:34:00.000-08:002012-01-26T10:34:06.378-08:00The J.R. Turner Interview<em>Jenny Turner (aka J.R. Turner) is a fellow author who has written many books of various genres, from young adult novels to adventure fantasy and seemingly everything in between. She is also the primary editor at Quake Publishing, the young adult imprint of Echelon Press, and edited this writer's first two novels. People who wear more than one professional hat are always interesting, and she was nice enough to share her thoughts on her own writing, editing the work of others and the publishing business in general.</em><br /><br /><br /><strong><em>Thanks for taking the time for an interview at Free Kittens. If you don’t mind, I’ll start with the dumb questions, such as, do you remember what first inspired you to become a writer? Was it another author, a particular book, or something else entirely?</em></strong><br /><br />Julie Garwood inspired me. Well, truthfully, she ruined me. I remember when <em>For the Roses</em> came out. I couldn’t hardly wait for the release because I’d devoured all her books more than once. On release day, I was there with money for a hard cover. Yes. I bought my first full-price hard cover—which was about half my weekly grocery budget at the time. I devoured it just as quickly—in one single day. <br /><br />They say you can’t judge a book by its cover and that’s exactly what happened over the course of that long, long year waiting for another book from Garwood. I chose one bad book after another. I decided I’d rather spend my time writing the book I wanted to read, instead of reading a terrible book.<br /><br /><strong><em>I know I’ll never forget getting that first acceptance letter for a story. What was your first publishing credit?</em></strong><br /><br />I had an essay published in a charity anthology with proceeds going to an abused women’s shelter. The book was <em>Crumbs in the Keyboard</em> and I wrote about the craziness of motherhood. <br /><br /><strong><em>You’ve written and published stories in a variety of genres. Any particular genre you enjoy more than others?</em></strong><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3qhDEZsLw9s/TyGYeylM8JI/AAAAAAAAAOw/-pOmmDr7n9E/s1600/redemption-2x3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" gda="true" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3qhDEZsLw9s/TyGYeylM8JI/AAAAAAAAAOw/-pOmmDr7n9E/s1600/redemption-2x3.jpg" /></a></div><br />I usually really love the book I’ve just completed or had released so I’m not sure if it’s because this book really is special, but <em>Redemption</em>, my urban fantasy novel, has made me fall deeply in love with the genre. A reader recently compared the ending to <em>The Stand</em> and I was walking on cloud nine. I loved the post-apocalyptic element—the struggle for survival against evil. All of it was just a blast.<br /><br /><strong><em>Your most recent young adult novels are the three (so far) in your</em> Extreme Hauntings<em> series. How would you describe these books to those who are curious?</em></strong><br /><br />Kaylee, the heroine, is such a superb character to work with. These books led me toward the more paranormal/supernatural aspects of writing. After having such a fabulous time working with ghosts, demons, and monsters, I wondered why I waited so long. The quest for internal understanding when the whole world has gone wacko, and everyone thinks Kaylee’s gone wacko, is a really cool dichotomy to work with. <br /><br /><strong><em>Did you always intend</em> Extreme Hauntings<em> to be a series, or did you start off thinking the first would just be a stand-alone novel?</em></strong><br /><br />I had been invited to write a YA series for Quake, so I knew in the beginning there would be six books total. <br /><br />I’ve been fleshing out the concepts and outline for the fourth book. This one takes place in a boot camp for teens. Kaylee and Davey are convicted of arson and assault, and the courts are not happy with them considering the legal trouble they’ve faced in the past. I’m looking forward to seeing how the authority figures in this book handle what happens when the supernatural entities begin to make themselves known.<br /><br /><strong><em>What are some of the challenges in writing young adult horror, a genre where it can be easy to cross the line between what‘s acceptable and unacceptable for kids?</em></strong><br /><br />My biggest concern is making sure the horror feels real to the reader. I don’t rely on the gross or the morbid to make them squirm. These are ghost stories and I really want to convey that spookiness, that terrifying moment when those eyes you feel on you in an empty room prove to belong to an unknown, unseen entity. That’s not an easy task, but it’s one I hope I accomplished. <br /><br /><strong><em>What is the one book you’ve published you are the most proud of? Why?</em></strong><br /><br />Gosh, this is so hard. Every book is different and every book has reasons to be my favorite. I’m proud of <em>My Biker Bodyguard</em> because it was based on my family and it won awards. I’m proud of DFF: Dead Friends Forever because it was my first YA book, my first published horror novel, and the first one I wrote for my kids. I could go on and on! <br /><br /><strong><em>You are also one of the editors Quake Publishing, Echelon Press’ YA imprint, which I’m assuming takes a lot of time. How do you manage to find time for your own projects when you aren’t busy editing the work of others? </em></strong><br /><br />I love editing and fortunately, Quake has a lot of really great authors who make my job easy! Mostly I have the time because I’m one of the lucky few who doesn’t have to have a day job. Because of this and a passion for the work, I’m able to accomplish many things. I rarely take a day off, not even weekends, because when I wake up in the morning, I’m eager to get to my computer and work on my current project. Vacations can be tough on me because half my brain is working on a novel or seeking solutions for an editing project.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8zAoNUUk3ng/TyGbd_4jD2I/AAAAAAAAAO4/vxWPmmAKuHw/s1600/dff.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" gda="true" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8zAoNUUk3ng/TyGbd_4jD2I/AAAAAAAAAO4/vxWPmmAKuHw/s320/dff.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><strong><em>As an editor, what do you look for when considering a manuscript submission? What makes a good young adult novel?</em></strong><br /><br />A strong style and voice will conquer almost any initial plot or character difficulties. I’ve avoided manuscripts where the author proved to be difficult or too emotionally invested in the current draft. I respect an author’s ownership of the work, but I also respect our in-house style-guide and if the two can’t meet—then we’re both out of luck. The best books in the YA genre go where they need to go and not shy away from plot points one might feel are offensive. Any subject matter can be handled delicately.<br /><br /><strong><em>Young adult fiction is currently a huge market, with a glut of authors jumping on the Stephanie Meyer or J.K. Rawling bandwagon. Is there a type of YA novel you’d like to see more of besides wizards and vampires?</em></strong><br /><br />I’m open to anything as long as it oozes imagination, passion, and admirable writing.<br /><br /><strong><em>What advice would you give to would-be authors in terms of writing and submitting?</em></strong><br /><br />Don’t submit too early! Great ideas and great books can be lost because authors are unaware the book still needs a good solid editing. Don’t expect editors to do it for you. I’d rather work on a stellar novel with solid writing than a potentially extraordinary novel that’s in dire need of a second pair of eyes.<br /><br /><strong><em>As we both know, having one’s work accepted is just the beginning of a long process, especially in terms of promotion. What are some of the most effective ways you use to get word out about your books?</em></strong><br /><br />Social media and face-to-face contact. Those two can work wonders and create a lot of buzz for a person. I think there are two ways these ventures can fail, however: interacting only with people you know and lack of follow-through. Don’t cancel your book signings, don’t ignore your blog and other accounts. Just because you have them, doesn’t mean they will be any good unless you work at them!<br /><br /><strong><em>I just recently bought a Kindle and I love it. I’ve been able to buy books by my favorite authors at a fraction of the price, and I’m more willing to take a chance on new authors. However, I’ve also noticed that the current explosion of e-books has resulted in a lot of stuff out there that may not have ever seen the light of day through traditional publishing. What’s your take on the impact of e-publishing on both writers and the publishing industry?</em></strong><br /><br />I think it’s fantastic. Anything that puts the control and profits into the hands of the people who do the work is awesome. With the way e-books are taking off, I think we’ll begin seeing a lot more first-time authors build a following and gain recognition where they may have been unable to breakthrough in the past. <br /><br /><strong><em>Finally, where are the best places to find your books, as well as places where readers can learn more about you?</em></strong><br /><br />I’m converting my website over to my wordpress account right now. The address for my wordpress account is: http://jrturner.wordpress.com and my website is: <a href="http://www.jennifer-turner.com/">http://www.jennifer-turner.com/</a><br /><br />All my books are available at Amazon.com and on Smashwords. Thank you so much for this opportunity to share with your readers!<br /><br /><em><strong>Free Kittens would like to thank Jenny for sharing her time.</strong></em><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DmAndersonsFreeKittens/~4/aE3YQaAW-Ms" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>D.M. Andersonhttps://plus.google.com/102347892588031935773noreply@blogger.com0http://dmanderson.blogspot.com/2012/01/jr-turner-interview.html